The NBA’s Florida Bubble Follows an Age-Old Historical Model

“When you combine the [classic sports] bubble with volatile times—think Berlin in 1936 or Mexico City in 1968—you sometimes get moments that defy the control of those staging the bubbles,” Dyreson said. “The tighter the NBA, Disney, and ABC/ESPN squeeze in an effort to be all things to all consumers, the more I wonder about the narrative slipping through their fingers.”

Despite its efforts, the NBA is not returning in a vacuum. Earlier this week, the Miami Marlins canceled their MLB home opener after at least 17 players and staff tested positive for COVID-19, threatening the viability of the league’s 60-game season after only four days of play. (The league is not using a bubble model; despite it issuing a 100-plus-page safety protocol, its teams will still log thousands of air miles traveling should the season continue as constituted.) MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred has expressed optimism in finishing the season, but noted that it would certainly shut down should the number of positive cases render a team, or the league, “noncompetitive.” And so, even if the NBA plays out the rest of its season without any major issues, a measure of doubt and unease will surround sports’ decision to return. Should the MLB’s experiment collapse, and should the NFL face similar hurdles later this summer, the ragged rate of success would still reveal a fracture in the commonwealth of U.S. sports.

Read: Baseball’s strange and poignant return to TV

Sports relies on both the evidence of and belief in progress. It’s expressed in time, in numbers, in bodies in motion. There will always be an eye fixed on the game clock, on pitch counts, on who can step up as a replacement, on which young prospect might one day save a franchise. But making progress in a pandemic can look a lot like immobility. Meanwhile, the path toward racial justice is far more complicated than saturating an audience with slogans. The NBA may wish its return to have an easy-to-love message of onward. But the truth is that its symbolism is nothing if not fraught.

Still, maybe these athletic undertakings—these physical dramatizations of life as it could be, set apart from society—serve a particular sort of purpose. Perhaps the sports-bubble concept persists because it has to. Because it’s a tool humans have used for millennia to collectively imagine a way forward. “We just don’t have a great theory—or if we do, it’s just speculation—about what the world would be like if we didn’t have [sports],” Brownell, the anthropologist, said. “It’s a real interesting test as to whether people can do without [sports], with all of these sorts of assemblies of human bodies getting together to share, in essence, a vision of a better world.”

As the NBA resumes its season, I will certainly feel uneasy. The queasy underbelly of the entire endeavor is unavoidable, given Florida’s steady rise in cases over the past month, and given the bleakness of Disney World just beyond the NBA’s constructed walls. Numbers and statistics will run parallel: defensive rating, total cases; points per 100 possessions, average daily cases per 100,000. I expect myself to hold those realities simultaneously. It’s the only way to keep the bubble from bursting.