COVID's confusing calendar grants Canada's relay champs immediate opportunity to repeat

This is a column by Morgan Campbell, who writes opinion for CBC Sports. For more information about CBC's Opinion section, please see the FAQ.

Raise your hand if the past few years have warped your sense of timing.

Yes, my hand is up. In my brain, the Tokyo Olympics took place this past summer (it was actually summer 2021), and the Beijing Olympics feel like they happened a decade ago (that was this year… come on, man).

Should we blame the pandemic?

Of course we should. If you're keeping track, we're about to enter Year Four of the COVID era, but my body clock and mental calendar still haven't recovered from those middle months of 2020, when big-time sports in North America stopped.

As we approach 2023, the sports world has settled into its new normal. The sports schedule used to help mark the passing of weeks and months and seasons — NFL games on my TV meant it was Sunday, and World Cup footie took place in June.

But now? The NFL has colonized Thursday nights, and FIFA squeezed the men's World Cup between U.S. Thanksgiving and Christmas, while the expansion of the NCAA football playoff will push their season even deeper into January.

My calendar doesn't lie, though. It is, in fact, late December, which means it's time for sports columnists to file their year-end roundups (or their crystal-ball columns about the year ahead.)

I won't risk glancing back, lest I spill a few hundred words on Fury-Wilder III, only to remember it happened two Septembers ago. So let's look forward to 2023, some trends I've been watching evolve, and some developments I hope I can write into existence.

BOUNCE BACK FROM DE GRASSE, BREAKTHROUGH FROM BLAKE

This past summer Canada's men's 4x100 metre relay won gold at the World Championships, clocking a national record 37.48 seconds and defeating the U.S. quartet in a mild upset. That feat doesn't leave too much room for improvement, yet here I go hoping for more.

Unreasonable?

Not really.

Record-shattering relays happen with raw speed meets continuity, and Canada's top male sprinters — Aaron Brown, Jerome Blake, Brendon Rodney and Andre De Grasse — have been running together for a long time. Smooth exchanges made the difference between gold and silver in Eugene last summer.

Doesn't mean the raw speed can't improve.

Yes, De Grasse ran a monster anchor leg, fending off American Marvin Bracy to safeguard Canada's only gold medal of the meet. But De Grasse also had a rocky 2022, slowed by COVID-19 and some nagging injuries. He's the rare sprinter with a long résumé (12 Olympic and World medals) and impressive personal records (9.89/19.62), but who might still have untapped potential. As he enters what baseball people would call his Age-28 Season, he might still put up even bigger numbers.

WATCH | Canada wins gold in 4x100 relay:

And Blake? He typically leads off, and hands to Aaron Brown, who is the only sprinter to make the finals in the 100m and 200m in each of the last three major championships. He's the textbook definition of a constant.

That makes Blake a variable. He had multiple-wind legal 10.00-second clockings last season, and might be ready to shatter sprinting's glass ceiling. A realistic improvement — to, say, 9.96 — puts him in the running to make world finals, and helps the relay team's chances at yet another national record.

Most years, it's idle speculation. But next year, there's another world championships, and one more opportunity for Canada's relay team to compete while key members are still in their primes.

RULE CHANGES MAKE BASEBALL FAST AGAIN

Readers who have followed me a while know I bias toward speed in every sport, and so I'm not happy to report that no MLB player has stolen 70 bases in a season since 2009, when Jacoby Ellsbury did it. And nobody has swiped 75 since Kenny Lofton in 1996.

The triple-digit stolen base totals Rickey Henderson and Vince Coleman used to log in the 1980s? There's a chance nobody ever does it again. This year's top two base thieves, Miami's Jon Berti and Baltimore's Jorge Mateo, stole 76. Combined.

The business-minded decision-makers shaping the way baseball is played are likely pleased with this trend. They decry stolen bases as inefficient, and they're right, technically. Your favourite base stealer might get thrown out or picked off, or strain a muscle rocketing to top speed. From an efficiency standpoint, it's better to keep your leadoff short and hope for the batter behind you to hit a home run.

But efficiency isn't entertaining. Risk is. And so is speed. If efficiency were exciting, we would watch Toyota Priuses drag race. If you're not watching sports for entertainment, why are you even here? Besides gambling, I mean. If watching prudent stewardship of assets turns you on, go watch your accountant do taxes, and let the rest of us watch sports for fun.

Major League Baseball, to their credit, finally gets it. They have introduced a series of rule changes for 2023, including a limit to pickoff attempts by pitchers, and bigger bases. The old bases measured 15 inches across; the new ones are 18 inches. Those two changes shorten the distance between bases, and encourage runners to take bigger leadoffs, and so they should encourage stolen base attempts.

Will it boost stolen base totals immediately?

Maybe, but current teams aren't built to run. There's no modern equivalent of the 1991 Expos, who employed Delino DeShields and Marquis Grissom, or the 1992 Braves, which fielded Otis Nixon and Deion Sanders.

Partly that's because the number of African-American MLB players still hovers near historic lows. But even if a Sanders-calibre athlete showed up today, what would baseball teams even do with his 4.2 speed? Probably nothing, except complain about him using it to do something inefficient.

But the new rules provide an incentive to use speed the way teams used to.

To steal bases, scare opposing pitchers, and score runs.

CRAWFORD-SPENCE… OR SPENCE-CRAWFORD

Whose name goes first when the world's best two welterweight boxers — Errol Spence Jr. and Terence Crawford — finally sign their contracts?

Who cares? Just make it happen. If you have to pay one of them a bonus to put his name second on the marquee, then find the money, because we're all running out of patience.

Boxing fans recognize this exercise in delayed gratification. We waited seven years for Mayweather-Pacquiao. And we know it can morph in unrequited longing. What happened to Lewis-Bowe? Or was that Bowe-Lewis? Nothing happened. They never met in the ring as pros.

WATCH | The Unknown History of Lennox Lewis' move from Canada to Great Britain:

Fans of normal sports don't know the feeling. Your team might never make the Super Bowl, but you know the Super Bowl is going to happen, and that, for the most part, the two most deserving teams will play in it.

But imagine the AFC champ opting out of the Super Bowl because they didn't like the venue. Or the NFC champ skipping the game because they wanted to play on a different date, or neither team committing to the game because they disagreed over ticket allotments or the TV broadcast.

That's boxing.

If the Philadelphia Eagles win the NFC, they can't reject a game with the AFC champs in favour of a matchup against a beatable team whose record masks their weaknesses — like Minnesota. And the NFL can't decree that some other title game takes place before the Super Bowl.

But plot twists like that happen several times a year in boxing. It's why Crawford collected $10 million to pummel David Avanesyan this month, and why Spence's next opponent will probably be Keith Thurman.

Nobody asked for those fights. Neither the sport nor the business of boxing demanded that they happen. All of those indicators point toward Crawford and Spence, sometime in 2023.

We hope.