No more ‘good games’

In the playoff baseball game, the DJ plays “every body clap your hands,” which is ridiculous since there are no people in the stands. The baseball stadium in Taiwan is filled with onlookers, except they are made of cardboard. The crowd goes wild at the football game, but it’s just some guy pushing buttons on a keyboard. The COVID-era adaptations in professional sports are stark and strange, but you can see them at the little league level as well. In my daughter’s soccer games, instead of lining up at the end of the game to give the other team fives and then run through the parent tunnel (in which all of us form a pyramid with our arms for the kids to run through, a joy that seems to instantly make them forget the pain of losing) the girls face the other team from their spot on the sideline and clap appreciatively from a distance. Makes sense, of course. But strange to see. And it’s hard for me to imagine the indignities of losing or the thrill of winning in youth soccer without having to face our opponents up close, to touch the hands of the other team, limp and sticky with orange slices and sweat, imagining briefly what it would have been like to grow up in a different neighborhood and have a totally different set of friends and teammates and parents cheering you on. Maybe next year, or at some point in the future, those traditions will return. But for now, no more “good games.” A small thing, but a strange one to do without.