Facing the Void

I know I don't write about sports very often here, though I appreciate that my other home base at The Atlantic includes sports under the general rubric of culture. But are any of you as depressed as I am by the prospect of a football lockout in 2011? Thinking about it, I realized that 1995 was the first time I lived in an area with established professional sports teams (somehow, the Hartford Whalers didn't register on my very young self during our years in Connecticut), and the first year I began to care about a group of teams. That year had a shortened baseball season, but the strike was the year past, and didn't wipe out a whole season, and the ongoing NHL lockout didn't really register. I've never been a major pro basketball fan, so I wasn't super-affected by the 1998-1999 lockout. So this will be the first time I really feel the disruption of a season gone awry, a part of my year will go missing. I feel like the playoffs are going to feel especially precious this season.