The calendar insists that, as of this week, that day will have only been one year ago. But it has the odd and strange feel of ANOTHER TIME

One man’s hits (and mostly misses) as he’s about to go 0 for 365 since a pandemic came between him and his last night out with the crowd.

Tuesday of this week will make it exactly one year since I’ve been at a live sporting event, a condition not entirely without its blessings and certainly not meant to imply anything like actual suffering, but still, it’s weird. Coronavirus had been spreading in the United States for more than a month when I took the ‘T’ toward Uptown and the Penguins-Senators puckfest on March 3, 2020, but few in the medical community and just about no one in the sports world envisioned the devastation that would be upon us in earnest only a week later. Things were deliciously normal that night inside the always hyper-acoustic PPG Paints Arena, which I’ve since been officially scolded for referring to as the PPG Pizzeria. That was nothing but a reference to the funny way the building’s new name has always hit my ear, but the PPG people eventually ran out of patience with it. In a very nice and good-humored email from their veep of corporate and government affairs, I was reminded of the pride taken by the corporation, its 2,500 local employees, and the Penguins in the name of the building, and that “we’d all appreciate that you consider using the appropriate name of the arena in the future.”

Fair enough, because it’s clear that PPG Paints realizes that in their negotiation to switch the naming rights over from Consol Energy, none of the money that consequently changed hands went directly to me. I didn’t get paid to call it that. The Penguins got those millions.

And really, it would not have taken much. One large pepperoni pizza might well have swung it.

So what was I talking about?

Oh yeah, Pens-Sens would go quietly into the books without earmarks, although it stands as the occasion of Sidney Crosby’s 800th NHL assist. I remember it as something less than a clash of goaltending titans. The last time I saw Matt Murray in black and gold, he put in a Senators goal off the back of his head. Bryan Rust had a hat trick, Evgeni Malkin had four assists, and Ottawa goalie Craig Anderson turned away all but seven of Pittsburgh’s 35 shots as the home team roared to a 7-3 win.

The global impact of me seeing no games live since that night remains at absolute zero, but it has sent me along mostly untraveled pathways of memory trying to find any other year like it. On what calendar did I last go 0 for 365 on live sporting events?

When going to games has been a major component of your job for going on five decades, and because you got that job in no small part because you loved going to games, a question like that can send you down some long pathways.

Was it 1955?

I was 2, so that’s possible. It was not 1956, because I’m told I saw my first big-league game when I was 3. For some reason, I showed up at Connie Mack Stadium in Philadelphia in a Brooklyn Dodgers uniform and was reportedly quite unhappy that I was not in the lineup that night.

Hey, play me or trade me. Was it 1970?

I had been to a couple of Eagles games by then, but it’s possible I was not at a live baseball game that year because my last visit to Connie Mack Stadium was the day of the moon landing, July 20, 1969. But I know I saw live sporting events because I was in four years worth of ’em as a high school football player. Yet, upon further review, is Mount Carmel 40, Panther Valley 7, really a live sporting event? Debatable.

I guess the answer is that I just can’t remember any such vacancy in my eyewitness life; what’s a lot fresher in my mind is what I miss

about actually going to games.

I miss wading through a Steelers crowd a couple of hours before kickoff, a crowd that sometimes appears to have cleaved into two groups — people who have hooked the index finger on one hand into a vacant plastic loop of a six pack while they manage an open container with the other; and people who are just carrying a full case. In a sea of Steelers jerseys, I miss spotting the relatively obscure numbers. Was that Mewelde Moore?

I miss scoreboards, particularly the one at Heinz Field that shows where the damn ball is. On TV, you have to figure that out on your own, and it’s difficult when all the networks want to show between plays is the coach on the sideline behind his Denny’s menu, the requisite chest-thumping Dance of the Defenders, the coach in the booth rubbing his forehead like he’s reading a ransom note, or a shot from the blimp showing one to three rivers. I know where the Point is! Where is the ball?!

I miss the mostly silent press boxes, augmented only by officious but helpful info on the press box PA and the murmuring snark of the journalists. I miss the almostsilence of the postgame, when the most serious work is done, itself punctuated arrhythmically by the late shift banging around things that are meant to be banged around late at night.

It’s been a year since I ate a 7 o’clock hot dog in a stairwell, the sportswriter’s dinner. A year since lunch was nachos and a bag of peanuts I can work through 6 innings, or two hours, whichever comes first. I notice I no longer routinely drink diet pop for three hours straight. Who woulddo that? It’s barbarian.

I miss the spacious tranquility of PNC Park before the game and the endless promotions begin. My petition that no one should have walk-up music if they’re hitting less than .250 hasn’t gotten anywhere. Suppose I might have to actually write one. I miss the crowd hugging and swaying to “Take Me Out To The Ballgame,” which is totally organic. No one told them to do that. No one told them to sway. It’s not the Seventh Inning Sway.

Sometime this year I hope, circumstances will sway, unfold, and conspire again to take me out to the ballgame. I hope.