Here’s a message for the “sports don’t matter at a time like this” crowd.

After this weekend, don’t ever say such a thing again.

During NCAA basketball conference championship week, at the dawn of the coronavirus epidemic, The Athletic’s Nicole Auerbach tried to sing that song as the ensuing wave of sports cancellations pulled the plug on all athletic competitions.

In a tweet that since has been deleted, she told us sports aren’t all that important, and we should all just go “read a book” while we were locked inside without an NCAA basketball tournament.

OK. Maybe I’ll read a Dickens classic instead of her college football coverage this fall in “The Athle…”

Uh, the “It’s Not All That Important.”

Well, that’s if football is allowed to be played in the fall.

Back on March 16, Sam Farmer of the Los Angeles Times tweeted about the start of NFL free agency, writing, “Must agree that free agency amid all this is tone deaf.”

Yet, over the next week he sent dozens of tweets about NFL free agency.

Maybe it was him who was deaf, and he eventually heard the call of his readers and social media followers that any distraction regarding sports is a welcomed oasis for fans in this arid covid-19 landscape.

On Friday, TribLive had more page views than any single day in the history of the website. Given the news content of late, that may not be a surprise.

Yet, amid a sea of stories surrounding the pandemic that day, the most-read story online was a sports post on this page about Antonio Brown working out with Pittsburgh Steelers wide receiver Diontae Johnson, the notion of Jameis Winston signing with the Steelers and Mike Sullivan’s quotes about Sidney Crosby potentially coaching someday.

You can bemoan that fact as a flaw in our ability to maintain perspective. Or you can see it as a commentary on our passion for the sports world even during a time when it has gone dormant.

I’m going to go with the latter.

Want further evidence? Did you scan through your cable TV guide this weekend? It was a myriad of old sports movies, repeated classic games and reruns of sports documentaries.

There was even a televised NASCAR race on FS1 that wasn’t a NASCAR race. It was a broadcast of a NASCAR virtual reality experience.

And people watched it. With their actual eyeballs.

Not only that, but it got some good reviews.

We clicked on these shows. We treated them like they were genuinely taking place. We tweeted about them as if they were in real time. We argued about them again. We debated the bad calls and coaching decisions. And we suspended our disbelief as if we didn’t know the outcomes.

Social media was littered with fake brackets of old NCAA moments, and teams, and games as if to cauterize the wound of not having real NCAA basketball during “March Madness.”

Nope. It didn’t work for me, either. I still was depressed. I still missed all the wild college basketball action, crucial NHL and NBA regular-season games, and the ascent of spring training toward the MLB regular season.

Thank goodness for all of those “tone-deaf” NFL free-agent signings. At least that was something real.

Forget about the salivating fans, though. Don’t worry about the privileged pro athletes or the billionaire owners, greedy leagues and conferences.

We get it. There are life-and-death matters afoot. Sports need to take a back seat. No one is debating that.

But shaming those who miss the events can take a back seat, as well. In fact, take those opinions and lock them in the trunk, never to be revisited.

Go ahead. Tell arena workers displaced by a calendar full of cancellations that sports don’t matter.

Tell that to the NCAA and high school athletes who lost their final years of eligibility before their careers properly culminated.

Give that refrain to officials and gameday support staff who have been frozen out by the cancellations.

And tell that to my colleagues at TribLive — and other sports media outlets — who have been laid off because of the scourge of the virus and what it has done to our nation’s economy as well as our nation’s health.

Those guys would kill for a game to cover. Because sports aren’t just their lives. Sports are their livelihoods.

As is the case for many others. High school coaches. The guy who runs the Zamboni at PPG Paints Arena. The guy who runs cable for AT&T SportsNet during Pirates games.

By the way, how about all those bartenders and restaurant workers near stadiums across America? How do you think they are making out right about now?

Personally, sports are my passion. And my business.

But I’d never try to tell you anything sports related is more important than what’s happening across the globe right now.

In return, just don’t tell me I’m not allowed to miss them. Or that they don’t matter.

Copyright ©2025— Trib Total Media, LLC (TribLIVE.com)