Therien's Take: A New 'Normal'

As the pause of team sports in North America and overseas has passed the two-month mark during the global pandemic -- with no end immediately imminent -- I have a lot of time to think about what a big role sports have played in my life.

I have been involved in pro hockey, between the playing side and then as a broadcaster, for the last quarter century. I played minor hockey as a kid in Canada, college hockey at Providence and international tournament hockey with Team Canada. In retirement, I've also coached hockey.

My daughters, as many readers know, are accomplished young basketball players. My son is also involved in sports, and I've gotten to coach him.

It goes without saying, then, that being suddenly devoid of sports seasons still feels pretty strange. But I have also been thinking about how strange it is for sports fans in general, whether their favorite sport of choice is hockey, basketball, baseball, football, soccer or whatever.

I think when you realize that you don't have something around that such a large percentage of the people in the world typically pay attention to as part of their lives, it deepens your appreciation or the role it played before everything went on pause. Whether it as diehard and passionate rooter who rides the emotional roller coaster with a certain team's fortunes, someone who enjoys sports talk as a source of a bit of water cooler or lunch time chat with colleagues or simply as an escape at home for a few hours from life's other problems and stresses, something is always in season.

Well, until just recently. Day after day has gone by now without sports for about 10 weeks. Are other folks getting used to it? Will sports retake their usual grip on our thoughts and emotions or will there be a "new normal" of sorts? How many rules and practices will change temporarily and how many might become permanent? It really makes me wonder.

I also can't help but wonder how the length of the pause will affect the fortunes of our sports teams when they do come back. The Philadelphia Flyers, for example, were on such an upward trajectory. There is great coaching in place now, but will the chemistry be exactly the same? With

At least as I see it, sports is about more than just the event. It is a story and this year's Philadelphia Flyers is a story for the entire Delaware Valley to embrace. The best part about watching this year's team was the fact that they came in with fairly modest expectations from anybody on the outside. Internally, though, the team believed in itself. Over time, fans started to believe in this team again, too.

I hadn't seen this sort of "dare to believe" passion growing locally this since the spring of 2012, when the Flyers-Penguins rivalry hit a fever pitch and Philly upset the Pens in a classic, wild and emotional series. We hadn't hit that level yet in March -- it takes playoff time to create that -- but things seemed to be building in that direction.

Right now? Everything is unpredictable. Not even the certainty of a return to finish the 2019-20 season is a certainty.

Something else that's uncertain is the comfortable familiarity of the change of seasons. The first hints of spring signaling that baseball season is right around the corner. As Labor Day passes, the savoring of a new NFL season begins. The chill in the air even before the first snowfalls coincide with the annual cycle in which hockey's often higher scoring and more loosely played early regular season games being replaced by teams starting to find their true identities.

These rhythms have been thrown off a bit and could be thrown off significantly if there's an impact on 2020-21 seasons. Will we still enjoy them? I'm sure we will. But there will be something that feels a bit different about it, whether or not we can place our finger on exactly WHY the timing of the games should matter.

Sports events are so meaningful to so many people's lives. That's true everywhere but especially here in the Philadelphia area and in other major sports fans. It needn't even be team sports. In this context, to me, I don't care if it's golf, boxing, MMA, figure skating or whatever someone follows with a passion. The void feels the same.

I have no idea what sports will look like in three years. Is all of this just a temporary thing. In a few years, will we say, "Hey, remember that year the Stanley Cup was awarded in August? That year when Major League Baseball went to three divisions instead of American and National League races?"

Keep this in mind, too, because it's one of the main things that make me wonder about what a "new normal" could look like for the foreseeable future: In the likely short-term future, there won't be any fans allowed in the stands.

After that, how long will it be until stands are allowed to be one-quarter full? Half full? Packed to the gills? I don't know.

Like it hate it, for the foreseeable future, the timetable until there's some sort of effective vaccine for the coronavirus very well could directly impact what becomes "normal" in terms of spectator capacities at sporting events.

Right now, sports are on the backburner by necessity. That's a shame. In a time where there are so many things dividing people, sports are something that sure would be nice to bring us together. For example, when the Eagles played in -- and won-- the 2018 Super Bowl, the only identity that people around the Delaware Valley really cared about for just a little while was their shared identity as Eagles fans. In Total strangers celebrated together en masse in a time before pandemic-driven social distancing.

February 2018 wasn't all that long ago, yet those memories feel almost quaint now to many of us. Right now, what would a championship celebration and parade even look like? Would there be one at all?

The key to sports fandom to me, is the mass sharing of the joys and agonies of the teams and athletes we care about. Championships are celebrated because they are so damn hard to win.

I speak from experience. I played on several Flyers teams that came mighty close to going all the way -- in 2000, especially, I felt with every fiber of my being that we were DESTINED to win with the group we had -- but the ultimate prize eluded us.

What would the city have been like if we'd won the Cup in 1995, 1997 or 2000? It would have been joyous, rowdy, crowded from street-to-street, from sports bar to sports bar. Longtime fans crying tears of joy. Stores selling out of championship merchandise faster than they could stock it on the shelves. A parade for the ages.

What would things be like in the immediate future for a sports championship? Joyous, for sure. But it'd have to be celebrate in a much more restrained, physically distant and muted way. It would still be a happy occasion for everyone with a rooting interest but I don't know if the intensity of the joy would hit the same fever pitch.

By necessity, as I said, sports are on the backburner. I think most of us long for a return to normalcy as we understood it before. When will that happen? No idea. Will there just become a long-range "new normal" that we come to accept? Quite possibly.

I'll tell you this much. It was a lot more fun a couple months ago talking about our rising hockey team than digesting all the bad news and uncertainties over the short-term and long-term aspects of our society than we've been bombarded with nonstop for the last two months.

Given my druthers,I'd even gladly prefer to watch on a loop a 10-hour marathon "highlights" compilation of the 1995-96 Florida Panthers neutral zone trapping, clutching and grabbing of jerseys and sticks, repeating icings and pucks flipped over the D-zone glass (a semi-legal tactic back then except if done by a goalie) than turn on the news right now.

How I would love to go back to the way it was -- not the nadir of clutch-and-grab hockey but, rather, to the way we are used to experiencing our sports seasons. I love going to Eagles games on Sundays and several Phillies games each summer as well. There is nothing sportswise that I cherish more than bringing the kids down to a Flyers game.

In life, there are so many events that we share with our children or brothers and sisters and family . At least within my family, many of the happiest memories involve sports either in the foreground or the background. Ever go to a family event during the playoffs? Before the smart phone days, we'd sneak out to the car to catch the score via the radio feed. More recently, we'd take peeks at our phone for the scoring update.

There are much more important things than sports, in the big picture. I totally get that. But that doesn't mean the absence of sports right now doesn't sting a little bit and it doesn't make trivial the sense of anxious wonder about how things may change beyond the very short term.

This week's "Therien's Take" was cathartic for me. I hope you found it entertaining -- we all need some entertainment these days -- and will come back for next week's Take.