To achieve a political climate so rancorous, so riven by hate, that it makes the DEM platform sound cogent you need a real villain. For the Left, moderates to maniacs, Trump has been tailor-made for the role of Dr. Evil, the cruel genius who has denied them their birthright as stewards of the nation.

It’s somehow comforting that, in a season where the NHL has done so much properly, the league still finds a way to seem like Bill the Butcher on player safety. Despite bold proclamations and new guidance the issue of player safety— particularly at playoff time—is fast frozen in the Brian Burke principle. That would be, no player is bigger than the playoffs

Depending on whom you ask, the Canadian Football League is either your grandfather’s sports league or a vibrant part of the national community. When you ask the government of Justin Trudeau about the importance of the CFL he’s apparently going to tell you that the Kielburgers don’t like it, so go fish.

For those of you who dreamt that the purging of Don Cherry might drag Hockey Night In Canada into the 21st century, sad news. Your grandfather’s TV program is still pounding the same fighting drums it always did when Grapes was the Grand PooBah of the sport.

There’s still time to save the NFL season, Mr. Goodell. Before you’re cancelling games because the equipment guy for the Rams or Bill Belichick’s sign stealer… er, research assistant… turn up positive, get a plan to have teams play in a hub city. Like the NHL.

In pro sports’ obsequious surrender to an organization that believes in the overthrow of society, putting political slogans on the diamond is the new normal in the grand old game. The NBA, too, has “Black Lives Matter” written on its courts. The NFL is choreographing a national anthem process that will put the Rockets to shame.

The descent of major sports reporting to an active arm of the progressive movement is edifying. There are days where ESPN’s reporting sounds more like corrective seminar on white entitlement than a news item. Sports, always an escape from reality, has been to turned into a re-education camp for viewers.

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.