The Anniversary of the Suspension of the NBA Season

Well time is a-flying. I don’t know how it’s already March 11th, 2021.

Today marks the one year anniversary of the day that the NBA suspended the season, kicking off the nationwide shutdown of sports, entertainment, and just about everything else. In addition to being a big NBA fan, this was especially salient for me because I was working in the front office of the Cleveland Cavaliers at the time.

I remember exactly where I was; sitting upstairs in our house in Akron, settling in to watch some basketball. I remember being on my phone, sitting in our silly bean bag thing and seeing the story unfold via notification:

First, that the Jazz/Thunder game was being delayed. Some Thunder players had come onto the floor, but the Jazz never came out, or something like that. Then, the Thunder go back to the locker room. That’s weird. Then we find out, after quite a while, that the game is being postponed. And then, the big news: Rudy Gobert tests positive for COVID, and the league is suspended indefinitely. Woah...

It gives me chills thinking about it. 

While it’s an optimistic time now, with people getting their vaccines, spring in the air, and hope for the not-so-distant future, it’s been a rough year to say the least. Well over 500 thousand Americans have died of COVID already, as well as many hundreds of thousands more around the world.

Life has been severely altered. The social fabric of America disappeared overnight. With no bars, restaurants, movie theaters, clubs, yoga classes, sports games, anything, where were people supposed to find their community? It just vanished.

Add to that the fear people have had to live with; about themselves, about their loved ones, about humanity in general. Add to that the “is it safe to do X?” 1,000,000 times a day. And then the eventual numbness that set in when we realized, truly realized, and each of us at a different time, that we were in this thing for the long haul. We couldn’t simply “wait it out”, because who wants to “wait out” a year, or maybe two or three? So we had to “adjust”, and to “adjust” was really to let go of what we thought life was; the life in the Before Times.

And I feel like because that adjustment happened slowly and then all at once, before we really realized it, there wasn’t a time to grieve the way of life we’d lost. It just sort of slowly faded away. It’s like the slow death of a grandparent to a stroke that they survive. They’re alive, and they’re “ok”, but they’re not themself really anymore. And you hope that they’ll come back all the way, but it’s hard to. It’s hard to believe that they’ve really gone away, in a way, permanently, when they were fine just the day before, and people come back right?

And so you wait, and you wait. And there’s improvement at first. And you wait, and then, slowly, over time, you realize that things aren’t getting any better. And by that time, long enough has passed that there is no shock that comes with realizing your grandmother isn’t coming back the way she was before, or that life is different and you’re different and you have been for a while now... There’s just a dull acceptance of a sad reality that we somehow came to incorporate.

And when there is no grieving, something strange happens to the body. There is a heaviness. And because there is no shock, and it sets in slowly, we don’t necessarily notice it settle in. Or, by the time we do, we can’t identify the cause. But it’s there, and it’s heavy, and you know what I mean.

We’ve all been dealing with something like that in this long COVID winter. A heaviness set in, the weight of 8 billion stories put on hold, many lost forever. The weight of the indefinite. The weight of the wait. And for many of us, the tragic weight of the suffering and loss of those closest to us.

As we await The Return, with light now peeking through the end of the long tunnel, perhaps we still ought to mourn the way things were before, and let a little weight roll off. Maybe if we take the time to miss sharing drinks, kissing our friends and family, clearing our throats without feeling like pariahs, not feeling generally afraid in social situations, not dealing with the constant decision-making where every choice is a matter of life and death, maybe we could lift some of the weight a little sooner, and feel like these early spring mornings, fresh and new and earnest and looking to the promise of our room to grow.

And if we are able to do that, then maybe we can truly know where we’ve been, and where we are, and where we’re going, and feel a little lighter as we soldier onwards.