PSAL Sports Postponed… Forever?

Imagine a world. Now imagine that this world is your world. In this world, you’re part of a PSAL sports team (Like fencing! Join fencing, ahem, this is not a shameless plug). You were distraught at the news that your spring season, and subsequent fall season, would be canceled because of the ongoing thing that I don’t quite remember. Oh, was it a paramedic? A hyperkalemic? AH YES! A pandemic… great.

You’re determined to practice throughout the whole block of time that you don’t have school. You’re going to be so jacked when you go back to school.

“Wow Y/N, how’d you get so jacked?” your crush will ask you in the hallway.

“I don’t know. Maybe I was born with it, or maybe it’s Maybelline,” you snicker cockily.

With all these fantasies, you get to work. One thousand push-ups every day coupled with 5,000 squats twice a day as a warm-up. You stab a raunchy target you made in your room because you would ideally have another person to fence, but remember, paramedic? No social interaction here, so our wall target shall suffice.

Fall passes with no signs of the panda-emic disappearing. But hey! You’re so pumped for the spring. You’ve got to have a season, right? Alas, it was postponed. Your disappointment was immeasurable, and your day was ruined. It’s already been postponed twice, like your SAT. But eh, you’ll live. What are another two months or so?

Two months fly by as you remain in agony over the fact that your skills have not been flexed since March. Will you even have a season? Unfortunately, you will not. It has been postponed again. The days continue to drag by as you cry every time you rewatch your old games. “Golly, when will I get to do THAT again?” you think as a tear rolls down your cheek.

It’s now the fall of the next year. Season? Think again. You try to practice, but this time, something feels off.

Where should my foot be? Is my arm okay? Why can’t I do the thing with my fingers? WHY CAN’T I DO THE THING? You find yourself slipping. Why can’t you do the thing? You’ve been training so hard. Why is it that you cannot do the thing?

No biggie, some more squats will do the trick. More squats, in fact, did not do the trick in reviving your athletic ability. Another four months pass. You try to practice again, but your brain has become clogged with fantasies of you doing the thing rather than actual knowledge of how to do the thing. You take to Messenger for advice.

“Can any of y’all do the thing? I tried a couple of months ago, but I just… can’t?” Your teammates share the same sentiment.

Oh my, whatever are we to do???? How are we going to win playoffs if we can’t do the thing??????!!!!!!

Another 18 years pass. You are still in high school. You didn’t eat your vegetables, and this is your karma. You’ve purposely been failing gym so you could be held back and perhaps still live the high school sports team fantasy. Gasp! Could it be?

PSAL sports will resume in the fall.

REALLY?! Despite your aging joints, your heart remains eight years old, and you jump for joy. Your squats may not have helped to remember the thing, but one thing is for sure: you can definitely tell that you’ve been doing squats.

It’s fall. You and your teammates are now grown adults with careers, and some of you even have families. None of this matters, for you all have some seasons to catch up on. You, the only member still currently a student at Stuy, summon a meetup at school, but you all freeze almost immediately upon actually doing the sport.

“Wait, what does this do again?” asks a teammate, who is now a company CEO. That would be the main piece of sports equipment you use to play this sport here. How did she forget that?

“Guys, where do I put this?” asks another as her toddler runs across the room. That would go into the plug behind you. How could she forget something so trivial?

However, you find yourself asking one of these seemingly useless questions.

“Hold up, what do I do with my feet here?” Oh no, it’s happened.

You’ve all forgotten how to do the thing. The seasons just kept passing you by, and just as you had to socially distance yourself from your team, your knowledge started to socially distance itself from you.

All of you quickly realize what’s happened. As you futilely try to remember how to do the thing, the thing simply does not want to be done. No matter how many times you move the feet, wave the arms, or smack the brain, the instructions stored in your brain have disappeared.

As if by coincidence, every other sports team from your original graduating class appears from behind the many trees in Rockefeller Park. None of them remember how to do their thing either. If there haven’t been seasons to recruit new members, how can these teams even continue? Can they even continue? Why are they here in the first place? Is this the end of PSAL as we know it?

Fear not, for Charlie Brown has come to our rescue. All of you never knew this, but Mr. Brown actually has won every Olympics since the beginning of time, in every sport you have all forgotten how to play.

“Oh, Charlie Brown! We’re saved!” you think to yourself.

Charlie respectfully throws all the equipment the teams own into the Hudson River. You all won’t be needing it anyway, and besides, he of course has his own set of everything.

The young lad then goes on to teach the entirety of Stuyvesant High School every one of the sports you have all failed at preserving. You didn’t do enough squats, I’m telling you. ‘Tis a shame you forgot in the first place. Over the next year, he becomes captain and supervisor of all the 43 PSAL teams at Stuyvesant High School. He single-handedly saves the PSAL because without Stuy, does the rest of the league even exist? I jest, unless you are in agreement?

Let’s come back to the fateful day Brown showed up. Your day never officially finished.
“Welp, time to pack up, I guess,” one of your teammates says grudgingly.

“Alright. You guys wanna get halal?”

Some things never change.