Where others hesitated, the NHL has decided to charge headlong in to the Valley of the Covid19. Using bubble cities Edmonton and Toronto it has created a format to protect the participants in the postseason from the virus as best as they can. Not only that, it has worked with the NHL Players Association to forge a new four-year extension of the collective agreement to deal with the expected plunge in revenues due to the pandemic.

Honestly, if you were making US$35, 40, 50 million a year playing in the NBA, MLB or NFL, would you not want to call your shots? If you could be golfing with a Hollywood star instead of sweating out a workout in Florida’s scorching sun what would you do?

The inimitable Dean Brown has captured the zeitgeist of the Covid-19 hockey draft: “The NHL has pulled off the impossible. Devise a system no one can understand to end up with a winner no one knows.”

We asked last week tinyurl.com/ycxrmcda how much political theatre fans will be willing to put up with as a price for their favourite sports. If Mike Gundy’s humiliation is any barometer of what lies ahead the optics will be uncomfortable in the extreme.

Has Pandora’s Box been opened in sports over charges of racism and indifference to fans? Will the public forgive and forget being vilified? Can sports get back to its profitable ways? We’re about to find out.

Like all appeasers Roger Goodell hopes this will buy him time and support from BLM. What will happen next, however, is that, having offered surrender on this cause, the white executives and stars of the league such as Brees will next be required to confess their previous racist history, chapter and verse. Think #MeBlackToo. Shaming will be a feature of the combines for young white players entering the NFL. “Prove you’re not a racist witch”.

When, in his almost 30 years as the face of the league, has Bettman ever proposed taking a risk before the other leagues had a chance to test-drive it first? (Okay, Winter Classics, maybe.) He was so slavish in his devotion to the other league’s salary caps that he cancelled an entire season to imitate them.

The new reduced “spread potential” for Covid-19 doesn’t seem to have caught up with many sports leagues who are still working from the March script of all-death/ all-the-time over touching a foreign surface.

While other sports generated stories about players refusing to play unless there is a vaccine or playoff formats that need a math major to decipher or no spitting, the NBA used just two words to keep the public’s affection.

Michael Jordan.

With no live sports to follow this pandemic spring, the archives are getting a workout. Great sporting moments are being played to fans, many of whom were not alive at the time they occurred. So can we just say to those who didn’t live thorough the post-1967-expansion NHL, that one of the most historic hockey moments is not all it’s made out to be?

Is there a role for the sports world as fearful politicians and panic-pushing media slowly come around to the idea that wrecking society is a greater calamity than the remnants of Covid?

We are about to discover that resuming life as it was is something trickier than first thought. With the toothpaste out of the tube can we be assured that a population petrified of someone getting within six feet will suddenly do a Bobby Ewing and pretend it was all a bad dream?

If teams come back to finish— or start— their season before empty seats under the Covid plague, look longingly at your teams. They may not resemble anything you’ve cheered before once the losses are totted up.

Desperate times call for desperate measures. Or, as they say in pro sports, desperate times call for divisional realignment.

When current Covid-19 numbers start to show the virus’ grip loosening— with warmer weather lessening its spread— it will be difficult to hold back the public demand to play ball. And Trump will oblige.

Apparently we have reached halftime in the battle against Covid-19, and the media savants are doing a highlight pack of the big plays and terrible mistakes so far. It’s not pretty. It would be nice if we could use the sports system of replays to go back and correct a few things from a month or two back.

Canada has not been a trailblazer in much of the response to Covid-19. The Trudeau government has been a day late and a quarantine short on some crucial issues. But in becoming the first major Western nation to completely withdraw Canada from the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo, Canada has made a bold step.

The NFL has always thought it doesn't play by the same rules as everyone else, so it shouldn’t be a total shock that— in the midst of a global pandemic— the league announced its new collective bargaining agreement with players that will take it through 2030.

One of these things is not like the other. The stock market is tumbling, a pandemic is at the door, and citizens are hoarding toilet paper. The outlier, of course, is the pandemic.

Panic is brewing over H1N1. The media have crossed a new Rubicon in how such stories are covered. Bigger is better. And badder is best.