Of all the many sports landmarks that were expected for Wisconsin in 2020 (Ryder Cup, Badgers playing Notre Dame at Lambeau, Brewers looking for a third straight playoff season), the Milwaukee Bucks’ chase for a championship felt like the most precious and attainable milestone.  

The Bucks’ season ending with a thud on Tuesday in a five-game series loss to Miami marked an unexpected setback that nonetheless felt telegraphed for a team that simply didn’t have the same verve inside the Orlando “bubble” that it had the rest of the season.

I didn’t have the verve, either. I’m not sure anyone did, and that’s not just the early ouster talking. 

NBA television ratings have fallen, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel sports readers aren’t as engaged as they were before the pandemic and sports bars are mostly empty. Those metrics are untrustworthy for myriad reasons, making it hard to fully assess how the community will recall this loss for the Bucks — if it registers as such a deep blow or merely the latest thing 2020 has peppered us with. 

At some point during the COVID stoppage, it occurred to me that the initial wave of “sports are back!” would quickly subside and give way to “this is weird.” There are the obvious reasons why. No fans in the stands, off-site announcers, muted celebrations and condensed seasons. They all chip away at our previous sense of the sports experience, even if we gladly bargain away those things knowing the constraints of a global pandemic.  

But what’s the primary reason the 2020 sports season has felt so hollow? As I try to take a psychological self-assessment, I find myself unsure, and given the lack of real-life encounters with groups of sports fans in the pandemic era, I don’t even know if I can talk my theories out.

Have others been feeling this way, that the sports world just doesn’t quite feel authentic post-COVID? 

Milwaukee teams have struggled

The COVID stoppage in March felt like a particularly harsh interruption for Milwaukee. The Bucks were the best team in the NBA, and the Brewers were set to debut fresh uniforms in a season-long celebration of their 50th anniversary in town.

The early sports substitutes — hiking, extra backyard soccer with the kids, Frisbee tossing at the local park — were fine but self-categorized as temporary. The great outdoors was ironically my waiting room as I longed to get back within the confines of an arena. I was holding up “the return of sports” as an eventuality and signifier of normalcy, especially knowing the Bucks had unfinished business.  

Then the Bucks struggled in their return. The return to normalcy for which I’d waited wasn’t materializing, because these weren’t the same Bucks. Had they reached the NBA Finals, I do believe the enthusiasm in Milwaukee would have intensified, but I’m not sure it could have possibly achieved what it would have been in a normal year.  

The Brewers struggling also hurts enthusiasm, but for me, this baseball season has never felt authentic. And any feelings about the Bucks or Brewers don’t explain why the Packers, about to kick off their regularly scheduled season Sunday, also feel off-the-radar at this point. Perhaps a lack of preseason on-ramp has taken us out of our rooting routine. Perhaps there’s still more to unpack. 

The lack of fans jars us in ways we couldn’t have considered 

Let’s say the Brewers win eight in a row and make the playoffs, then advance to the World Series. Without question, that would be a big thing for Milwaukee. But I have to wonder if it would be remembered more as a paper achievement than a moment in time captured forever in hearts and minds of Milwaukeeans. 

The lack of fan attendance isn’t just something observed on television. It’s the familiar smell of tailgating near the stadium, the hum of Brewers supporters united in club attire marching across the bridge over Miller Park Way to the outfield gates, the bar shuttles on the highway. Reminders. When the team moved within one win of the World Series in 2018, you couldn’t walk into a restaurant or department store without seeing someone clad in Brewers gear.

Today, we make those trips as quickly as possible — if at all — covered by masks that inhibit any sort of real interaction.  

Today, there’s no perceived home-field advantage, no high-fiving strangers, no chance that your friend is going to score great seats at the last second and call you 30 minutes before first pitch to see if you want to go.  

Do we discount how these subtle details shape and make our sports experience? I don’t think watching the games on TV with empty stadiums is all that world-altering, although I’ve started to long for the audio of fans immediately reacting to a well-struck ball or physics-defying dunk. Heck, I’d even take a misjudged fly ball at this point.

There’s also far more to worry about

On those rare occasions when I do get to interact in person with my friends or neighbors, we don’t talk about the game. We talk about schools. Are your kids going back in-person? How are they doing with digital learning? How’s working from home? 

I could sense my own interest in sports waning early in August, around the time my kids’ school (and my wife’s school; she’s a teacher) began releasing information on how they were going to proceed. It’s certainly a new anxiety.Every day is another risk taken, in which members of my family spend long hours indoors with a large group of people. Having spent a great deal of time isolated working from home, I’m simultaneously nervous for them and happy that they get at least some version of the human interaction that I don’t get without a fully operational office. 

We can’t altogether ignore the unease many feel that these sports leagues are taking their own risk by bringing people together at a time when the virus remains a very real threat.

But maybe the answer is simple. For years, we’ve heard the argument that sports occupy an overly inflated place on the hierarchy of societal importance. Perhaps during a global pandemic, sports finally fell to a more suitable peg.

Maybe it’s just because these seasons are just too weird to be real

Baseball can be an exceedingly random game when there is a small sample size. With an expanded playoff field and only 60 games, it feels ridiculous to view making the 2020 MLB playoffs as an achievement when the heretofore model recognized teams more selectively, and for a lot more work.

In a normal September, I’d be paying attention to several games a day, knowing the outcomes affected the Brewers. In 2020, I barely check the standings, knowing they’ll shift dramatically in a day or two and perhaps also feeling that it’s all random, anyway. 

The best-of-three format in the opening round means plenty of higher-seeded teams are going to make early playoff exits. A team like the Brewers, struggling as they are, could get hot and win the whole thing. Would that seem entirely real, even to the fan base?  

This circumstance, however, feels like an issue that affects only the diehards. The sports experience has always relied more on the casual-fan masses than most diehards want to admit, and it’s their disappearance from the equation that contributes to this emptiness. Many fans follow the sport simply because they can go to games, watch with friends and occasionally catch a highlight on their phone. Their investment doesn’t extend to watching faithfully on TV in the midst of a bigger global event. 

Wisconsin football, an experience that’s almost more about the peripheral experiences for this level of fan than the game itself, won’t happen this fall, and if it does happen in the spring, it won’t offer the same opportunity for bowl games, postseason trophies or the College Football Playoff. The NBA bubble, with no home arenas, games played in the afternoons and early evenings, and even the removal of that three-day window between games that I might have previously told you was too bloated, can’t heighten the drama in the same way it once could. 

All that circles back to my main question: Am I the only one feeling this?

I still don’t know, because with whom am I going to have these conversations? I’m not outside Fiserv Forum, soaking in the buzz of the Deer District. I’m not at a sports bar. I’m not walking around the lakefront and seeing the jerseys. I’m not even sitting down for dinner at BelAir Cantina or Cafe Benelux and overhearing conversations about bench minutes. There’s an online community, to be sure, but that doesn’t feel like the local sports scene.  

Will the Packers be different? 

Here’s the ultimate litmus test: Will I still feel this way when the king of Wisconsin sports hits the field? The Green Bay Packers begin their season Sunday in Minnesota before an empty stadium, coming off a 13-3 year that ended in the NFC Championship Game. Surely, this will inspire a renewed sense of Wisconsin sports fandom across the state, right? 

If it doesn’t, I won’t be able to adequately say what’s to blame. I can explain the Brewers and Bucks — teams that struggled post-COVID in weird seasons in front of no fans at a time when there was still plenty to worry about. Some of those factors remain in play for the Packers, but not all. 

Will the season still feel too strange to fully embrace?

And if it is, when will it feel right again?  

JR Radcliffe can be reached at (262) 361-9141 or jradcliffe@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter at @JRRadcliffe.