Were Sports Something We All Just Imagined?

Being cooped up alone for long stretches can blur the lines between fantasy and reality. And after so many years in isolation, it’s gotten hard to remember whether sports actually existed or if they’re an example of the Mandela Effect—a collective false memory like Nelson Mandela dying in prison or the United States being a world superpower.

Many of us seem to remember watching and playing sports like “baseball,” “basketball,” and “football,” but when we turn on the TV, they’re nowhere to be found. And one channel that I could have sworn only aired sports is showing 24/7 coverage of pimply teens playing Overwatch.

And here’s where things get really weird: we all seem to remember sports differently. I heard someone say LeBron James was the greatest basketball player of all time, which was bizarre, because Michael Jordan was obviously better. Six for six in the finals? It almost doesn’t seem real. Maybe it’s not.

Then someone else told me that Cassius Clay was “the greatest fighter the world’s ever seen,” but if my memory serves me correctly, that title belongs to Muhammad Ali. You’d think if sports were real, we’d all remember them the same, like history.  We all know the GOAT of documents is the Constitution and that World War II was at least twice as interesting as World War I. But no one can agree on the MVP of the 1992 Olympic Dream Team, other than that it wasn’t Christian Laettner.

If our memories are so different from one another, with no real-world proof to back them up, there’s only one explanation: Coronavirus has implanted fake memories of “sports” in our collective brains. On the bright side, we can sleep easy knowing Bill Belichick isn’t out there lurking in the night.