Mar 18, 2020 3 min read

So what is life like with the threat of the coronavirus sending you home to work after affecting so many things, including sports seasons?

I wonder if it’s like this:

You have just finished the third season of Sex and the City on DVD and are about to check your emails for the 25th time on this morning, sure that this virus scare will end soon and allow you to return to the office.

You open up the cupboard and stare at a stash of goodies purchased especially for those March Madness basketball tournament games. Somehow, Cheeze-its, chips and dip just don’t taste the same when you are left watching, “Masked Singer,” a show where people dressed in animal costumes break into songs from “Evita” while dancing the “Charleston.”

Still, you were intrigued by the one dressed like an octopus.

Maybe the lowest point of the past few weeks occurred Sunday, when you got into a raging argument over who the better player was in Australian Rules Football, Leigh Matthews or Wayne Carey.

And you simply refuse to believe that it is impossible to bet on the rat race everyone says you live in. Someone has to win, right? That’s how desperate the situation has become.

The torture of working at home just a few steps away from a 70-inch television screen and the remote that operates it is almost too much. How many NCIS reruns can be shown before it explodes?

You have always wondered what it would be like to work at home. Now that you have been given the opportunity to do so, with the wife and three kids, all extricated from jobs and school because of the virus, it is not turning out the way you thought.

You catch yourself more and more watching the cartoon shows that thrill your 6-year-old and you are starting to like them. … a little too much.

And there is no more toilet paper.

You want to be at PNC Park, watching the Pirates, or scurrying to your son’s soccer match. You catch some high school baseball games each year because your son is working hard to get playing time.

At one time, getting together with your best friends at the local watering hole to take in a Penguins hockey game, a dozen wings and a root beer or two seemed to be getting stale. Now you would go to any length, even volunteer to take an experimental vaccine that might cure the virus, despite the side effect of possibly growing a third arm, just to get sports back into your routine.

This surprises you because you always thought it really wasn’t that important in your life. Now you have come to the conclusion that it is more important than you once believed.

Sports are important because they are unimportant compared to so many other things, an escape from the things we worry about on

a daily basis: our health, wealth, family, work responsibilities, friendships and all the other worrisome details of our existence that cause our hair to turn gray.

It has taken the loss of these events because of a feared virus to make us realize this.

And that will make it all the more joyful when we return to normal.

For now, well, let’s see what’s going on with Carrie Bradshaw in Season 4.

Assistant sports editor Joe Tuscano can be reached at jtuscano@observer-reporter.com