It was a miserable time, would be a shame to see it end

Ordinarily, preparing to watch your team in a playoff game is a confrontation with mortality.  By this point you know your heroes well. You've learned their strengths and weaknesses. You know their endearing qualities and their annoying faults.  You've seen them endure setbacks and overcome obstacles.  A playoff season is a successful season by most measures so by and large they've done well. You like your team by this point. You've lived an entire journey with them. And now it could all come to a sudden end. So when the day comes that it can all end forever, naturally the question arises, what was it all about?

What was the 2020 Saints season all about? Should it even have happened in the first place? Did it? There were so few witnesses. We've long argued that live pro sports is a kind of civic exercise. It builds community and solidarity among the masses around shared passions, symbols and experiences. It inspires creative and elaborate cultural expression.   Like any entertainment, it offers diversion and comic relief from daily drudgery.  But among such entertainments sports is uniquely populist. Its energy, its sense of authenticity derives from the presence of a crowd.  

But there have been no crowds this year. Despite Gayle Benson's reckless and selfish desire to gather one, and despite the mayor's bending over backward to accommodate her while yelling at you for having Christmas with your family.  Despite Sean Payton's extremely coach-brained scheme to quarantine 50,000 people, there will only be about 3,000 brave but deluded Saints fans in attendance for today's possible concluding event. Even if we set aside the guilt and anxiety that would come with being among that audience during a pandemic, it's not anything like the immersive, cathartic experience of a full Superdome. The risk of being there is real. The benefit is non-existent. 

Again, that's been the case all season, so what have we been doing?  Well we've all been watching on TV and trying, in our increasingly spare leisure when we can allow ourselves to put aside the burning world around us and enjoy something, to connect with something like the experience we remember. And it's in there somewhere.  It's underneath a hundred layers of dissociation and confusion and a laugh track of fake crowd noise, but somewhere in there we can see our guys. There's something of this thing we're all invested in. We still care about that. It's just that, like a lot of things, that's been harder to feel this year.  It could end today.  A whole epoch of it could end, in fact. That's still a shame, right?