ONLY THE DOTS REMAIN:

As a softball fan, I was well aware that coach Patty Gasso has made the University of Oklahoma a great softball program. The first televised softball game I ever saw was between the Sooners and Tennessee Volunteers in the Women's College World Series of 2013, and it turned out to be a game (and a series) won by the pitching and bat of the greatest softball player I've ever seen, Keilani Ricketts. Oklahoma has won two more championships since, and finished as runner-up in softball's last pre-pandemic season, 2019. Gasso's team joins UCLA and Florida to form the sport's enduring elite, with the fourth spot filled by a rotating cast of legacy powers that find pitching and get hot at the right time of year.

But a great team? That's a different question, since a great team has to transcend the great program that produces it. A great team has to supersede even the great players who compose it, since we all know that greatness is not explained by talent alone. A great team has to discover a way to dominate and at the same time to be tested, and to make its claim to dominion a simultaneous claim of survival -- without stumbling, it has to prevail in a trial by fire. A great team has to find a foil, an antagonist, and, if not quite a nemesis, then at least an opponent worthy of its own lonely quest. Can a great team subsist on a diet of slaughter? I didn't think so, but that's what I went to Athens to find out.

Softball, you see, has a slaughter rule -- known, more accurately, as a run-rule -- and the 2021 edition of the Oklahoma Sooners have played most of their games as if to force its invocation. They opened their season beating Texas El Paso 29-0 and came to Jack Turner after not simply beating but run-ruling then-No. 7 Texas in three straight games, a slaughter-rule sweep. They were 33-0; had won 40 in a row; and led the nation in nearly every possible statistical category, particularly home runs, where they were looking to make history. They had the nation's two most prodigious home run hitters, Tiare Jennings and Jocelyn Alo, batting leadoff, on account of both players also batting over .500. Indeed, Oklahoma's team batting average was more than 100 points higher than No. 21 Georgia's, and the Sooners had hit 41 more home runs. In a sport of closely contested games often decided by iron-woman endurance "in the circle," timely home runs and crucial mistakes, Oklahoma had achieved the kind of dominance that wins games before either team takes the field. But then, I knew they were dominant. I wanted to know if they were great, which is to say I wanted to know if they were Patriots great, Warriors great, UConn great, Alabama great -- I wanted to reconnect with live sports by finding out if the 2021 Oklahoma softball team had the kind of greatness you can feel.

That was my excuse, anyway -- the stated occasion for my journey as well as for this essay, when really I decided to go for the same reason everyone else is going to see live sports these days: To get out of the house. To get in the car and drive. To get stuck in the resurgent traffic. To taste Dippin' Dots, which always struck me as a devious simulacrum of ice cream until they were taken away, at which point I realized they had been the real thing all along.

The game was on TV after all, along with, I don't know, the Owls vs. the Mocs, or maybe the Crusaders vs. the Lancers, and my wife was able to watch it from the same couch where we've been watching sports since America decided that athletes were the equivalent of essential workers. Even Michele Smith and Beth Mowins, ESPN's redoubtable softball announcing team, called the game "remotely," which is to say from the comfort and safety of their own homes.

So why go? Why bother going? That was the question I was really asking when I decided to test-drive the presumption of Oklahoma's greatness. Of course, sports fans go to sporting events in order to be participants rather than simply spectators -- in order to root, root, root for the home team in the belief that their voices, their loyalty, their devotion, the sheer force of their crossed fingers, private rituals, and prayers will influence the outcome and maybe even prove decisive. That belief in the power of belief was one of casualties of the pandemic, because when sports returned to American televisions they looked remarkably like, well, sports, even in the absence of crowds. The games not only went on; they were often superb, their outcomes dependent not on "crowd noise" but on whether their true and sole participants, the athletes, were able to rise to the occasion. The bubble left the games intact, the athletes unfazed. The only thing that changed was us, with cardboard effigies taking our seats and the roar of the crowd preserved in the roar of the same overbearing sound systems that, in better times, blasted Gary Glitter.

I drove to Athens, then, not simply to see the game but to see what remained of the experience of fandom now that fandom had been proved extraneous. I wasn't just going to a game; I was going back, and so was softball.

There was no softball championship last year. The sport was not deemed necessary for national survival, and its season ended when everything else did, a few weeks into March. And so a lot of the players I watched on TV in 2021 I had last watched two years ago, some of them fifth-year seniors who'd received dispensation from the NCAA to recover what was supposed to be their final seasons. We are used to seeing athletes grow up on the field, right before our eyes. But many of the best college softball players of 2021 seemed to have grown up elsewhere, as if they'd all taken a gap year that turned out to be no fun at all.

And that was the feeling at Jack Turner, at least at first. I had gone there to experience greatness, but what I first experienced was the unmistakable air of convalescence -- an entire world blinking back to life after an enforced hiatus. No effigies filled the seats, but UGA's athletic department had done such a scrupulous job of keeping spectators apart that the tape prohibiting whole swaths of the stadium from being inhabited served a symbolic function, reminding us of absent friends. There was a precise allotment of 150 people in the stands; there was also an imprecise level of lockdown observance, with some of us masked, some not, and at least one -- me -- awaiting a second shot. The result was an Irish wake of a game, half party and half memorial, and a reminder of why wise men throughout the ages have warned against thinking you can go home again. I went to Jack Turner wanting my live sports to have stayed the same and found that the only things unchanged were the Dippin' Dots, which still tasted like freezer burn, slightly sweetened.

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