Call it nascent normalcy, if you will. The return of a thing that was — every year, mind you, since your great grandparents roamed the Earth — and then suddenly wasn't.
If that's too grandiose, let's put it this way: Major League Baseball is back! Not last year's joyless, almost perfunctory 60-game package with fake crowd noise, COVID cancellations and no Buster Posey, but the real deal.
The Oakland Athletics will ring in the start of a full Bay Area baseball season Thursday night, with fans in the stands and everything, the cardboard doppelgängers that haunted stadiums in 2020 relegated to wherever cardboard doppelgängers go when their service is no longer required.
Game time is 7:07 p.m., with the A's squaring off against the Houston Astros in the first of a four-game series at the Oakland Coliseum. The crowd will be considerably thinned, for purposes of social distancing, yet a crowd it will be, nonetheless, for the first time since the pandemic made just about everything except staying alive an afterthought.
With Alameda County now in the orange tier, the Coliseum is allowed to host up to 33% of its capacity. The A's, however, have opted for a smaller mix; the team is capping attendance at 26%, or about 12,000 people.
Other safety measures include cashless payments and concessions delivered straight to your seats, which may be the first pandemic protocol that people will actually enjoy.
Meanwhile, the San Francisco Giants have announced they will welcome a limited number of fans back to Oracle Park on April 9, with special testing and vaccination protocols in effect.
—Jon Brooks and Sara Hossaini