Credit...Anthony Geathers for The New York Times

The Great ReadFeature

What I Learned Inside the N.B.A. Bubble

Against all odds, it really was a refuge of competence, normalcy and transcendent play. But the outside world has a way of sneaking in.

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The moment I entered Walt Disney World, I felt extremely sad. I was driving alone in a hypersanitized rental car, wearing two masks and a pair of disposable gloves, with all the windows rolled down to blast out any lingering virus. Florida’s atmosphere was gushing in all over, swamping me with its jungly breath. The dashboard thermometer said 100 degrees. The freeway took me past multiple theme parks — SeaWorld and Universal Studios and a Bible-based attraction called The Holy Land Experience. At one point, I passed a fake volcano. Billboards advertised gun shows and hospitals and lawyers and Botox.

And then there they were: Mickey and Minnie Mouse, standing on either side of the road, making white-gloved gestures of welcome. A grand arch promised, in looping cursive script, that I had reached the place “Where Dreams Come True.”

Disney World, in normal times, is a sealed kingdom of childish joy. It promises frictionless fun to anyone who can afford the entrance fee. I had been there earlier this year with my family and, against my will, I loved it.

But now I was alone. Florida was a raging pandemic hot spot. The airplane to Orlando was nearly empty, as was the airport itself. For six months, my soul had been clenched in a fist of worry. I had stopped exercising and lost much of my hair; one of the arms of my glasses had snapped in half, but I never got them fixed, so now they tilted at crazy angles on my face. Disney World’s cheerful entrance felt like an exit for a road that had been closed for decades — the route to an old American fantasy that had permanently expired.

I had not come, this time, for childish fun — to eat frozen bananas and be splashed by simulated cannonballs in the Pirates of the Caribbean. I had come, absurdly, to watch basketball. I was here to escape the United States and enter the N.B.A. bubble.

In theory, the N.B.A. bubble sounds ridiculous, like a devastating parody of consumer capitalism. In the midst of our global nightmare, the world’s most powerful basketball league decided to finish its season in the candy-colored refuge of the world’s most famous theme park. Players would live in strict isolation at Disney resorts, where they would have access to the kind of rapid daily virus testing that, for months, the rest of the nation had been begging for. Games would take place in arenas without crowds. Regular citizens, quarantined at home, could watch it all on television. The N.B.A. bubble was like a circus crossed with a corporate retreat crossed with a space mission. It was March Madness in Versailles.

Say what you will about the bubble — that it was a cynical money grab or a beacon of hope — the other thing to say was that it would never, ever, ever, ever work. To be honest, the scheme’s inevitable failure was a main reason I agreed to go. In exactly the same spirit, I would agree to ride a fixed-gear bicycle to Antarctica to see a reunion of the Beatles. Basketball is a sweaty, full-contact sport requiring vast armies of support workers. The virus had already penetrated every other space in America, from luxury cruises to the White House. Even if, by some miracle, the N.B.A. bubble could be kept virus-free, the quality of the basketball would probably be terrible. The season had already stalled out for months — inevitably there would be rust and injuries and weird team chemistry. Games held in empty arenas, in a theme park, would feel like exhibitions: sloppy, low-stakes, disjointed. On cable sports shows, talking heads shouted about putting an asterisk after this year’s champions.

Nevertheless, the N.B.A. persisted. Players traveled to Disney World from all over the globe and quarantined, alone, in lakeside resorts. Teams started practicing. On July 30, impossibly, the official season restarted. Players put on uniforms and jostled and breathed on one another and exchanged high-fives. They dunked and hit buzzer-beating shots. It seemed like footage from another world. Other sports leagues tried to restart, too, with mixed success; Major League Baseball had whole teams suddenly drop out of the schedule. Every week, meanwhile, the N.B.A. issued a triumphant news release announcing that every single player in the bubble had tested negative.

As the summer crawled forward, as the membrane of the bubble held, I watched in disbelief as that purely theoretical date on my calendar — Aug. 10 — turned real, and I was forced, against most of my instincts, to wrap myself in P.P.E. and fly to Florida to enter the bubble myself.

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The Houston Rockets took on the Oklahoma City Thunder in the first round of the playoffs in September.Credit...Anthony Geathers for The New York Times

But first I had to wait. Until I returned a negative Covid test, I wouldn’t be allowed near a basketball court. So I lived for two days in my hotel room, ordering “contactless” room service (they leave the cart outside your door), reading in the bathtub and doing shaky core exercises on the yellow floral carpet in front of the TV. I had a vague fantasy that I would use this bubble time to improve my life — to get back in shape and read a stack of books and catch up on multiple work projects. I would heal some of the damage that 2020 America had done to me. Maybe my hair would grow back.

Instead, I read the news. Across the country, in cities large and small, protests still raged after the murder of George Floyd. It was the largest protest movement in U.S. history. As I sat in my hotel room, storefronts were smashed in Chicago; the city raised the downtown bridges to isolate the crowds; more than 100 people were arrested; two were shot.

I stared for a while out my window, where a panoramic Florida thunderstorm was rolling in over the resort-pocked jungle. The sky turned purplish green, the color of moldy bread, and jagged lightning flashed and froze. Fat drops started to fall. But the glass of my window was so thick I couldn’t hear a sound. I thought about bubbles. The word “bubble” is onomatopoeic — your lips bounce, your mouth goes round, the air pools and pops. In nature, bubbles form when two incompatible substances meet: gas enters liquid, with no way to escape, and a result is this temporary fix, a transparent sphere. It struck me that “bubble” is a funny metaphor to use for a safe zone, because bubbles are famously fragile. By definition, they are surrounded on all sides, vulnerable in every direction, wrapped in threat. A bubble is always right on the verge of being popped.

I turned on my TV and found a basketball game. Onscreen, it was amazing how normal it looked. The N.B.A. had managed to create a near-perfect visual replica of its pre-pandemic product: the colorful jerseys, the blond wood of the court. There were even virtual fans around the edges.

But there were also key differences. As a result of the Black Lives Matter protests, the N.B.A. was, for the first time, allowing its players to wear explicitly political messages on their jerseys, from “I Am a Man” to “Group Economics” to “Education Reform” to “Say Her Name.” During the national anthem, almost every player and coach knelt. Near one sideline, in large letters, the court read: “Black Lives Matter.”

It was refreshing to see this tiny fraction of reality invade the fantasy world of professional sports. But the translation was also a little clunky. Even among mainstream corporate entertainment products, the N.B.A. has always had a particularly vexed relationship to race. The league’s players are overwhelmingly young Black men, and their job is to perform transcendent feats of athleticism for coaches and executives and audiences who are mostly white. In the bubble, during breaks in play, the arena’s big courtside screens would sometimes flash a montage of racial-justice slogans, one after another — “Black Lives Matter,” “I Can’t Breathe,” “How Many More?” — while blasting, in the background, Twisted Sister’s 1984 hair-metal anthem “We’re Not Gonna Take It.” This felt very precisely wrong: The players’ raw, personal, urgent calls for human dignity undercut by an outmoded arena-rock cliché. Furious sorrow could be converted, so easily, into a spectacle — something to sell beer and help people relax after work.

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Lucky fans score virtual courtside seats in the N.B.A. bubble in Orlando.Credit...Anthony Geathers for The New York Times

In my life, basketball has always been a deep emotional refuge. When I feel sad or agitated or morally conflicted, I can go shoot 100 free throws to calm myself down. The game is one of the purest forms of meditation I know. Sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I run a set of numbers through my mind like prayer beads: 20, 23, 7, 8. This is the stat line (20 points, 23 rebounds, 7 assists, 8 blocks) of the N.B.A. legend Bill Walton in one of the most glorious games in basketball history: Game 6 of the 1977 N.B.A. Finals, when the underdog Portland Trail Blazers won their only championship ever — a holy moment in the franchise’s otherwise cursed history. I am originally from Oregon; the Blazers are my only sports love that has survived into adulthood. (One of my secret motivations in going to Orlando was to see them play in person.) Walton’s stats are legendarily complete, dominant both offensively (20, 7) and defensively (23, 8), both individually and communally. They remind me that basketball is not simply a game: It is a nearly mystical blend of individual and collective excellence — one of America’s great cultural inventions. That 1977 Blazers team was a ragtag miracle, a swarming coherence of misfits; no one expected them to win anything. And yet they won. I think about Walton’s Game 6 numbers so often that I’ve considered getting them tattooed on my arm: 20, 23, 7, 8.

Against all odds, this year’s Blazers had become one of the bubble’s most inspiring stories. Behind their charismatic superstar, Damian Lillard, they had won multiple games on improbable last-second shots, and, despite a disappointing season, had managed to lunge into position to steal the Western Conference’s final playoff spot. Every game was crucial and contested.

In my hotel room, standing up because I was too nervous to sit, I watched them play the Dallas Mavericks. The game went back and forth, until, with just over 90 seconds left, Portland trailed by three. The shot clock was about to expire, and it seemed like one of those doomed sports moments when all of reality conspires to make you and your whole geographical region feel temporarily dead inside. I muttered curse words at the TV. That was when Lillard, smothered by a defender, rose up and shot from 33 feet — preposterously far from the hoop. The ball hit the back of the rim, bounced 15 feet straight up and then somehow fell through the net.

Lillard finished with 61 points — his third 60-point game of the season, something only Wilt Chamberlain had ever done, back in the Mesozoic Era of the 1960s. The Blazers won by three. Lillard’s performance was so instantly legendary that, after the game, Adidas put all of his signature shoes on sale for $61 a pair. I was so swept up in the moment that I actually tried to buy some, but before I could even type in my credit card number, every shoe in my size had sold out. I was so amped up that I couldn’t fall asleep. I just lay there in my overstuffed hotel bed, thinking about Lillard’s shot and Walton’s numbers, and sometime in the middle of the night I checked my phone to find that my Covid test results were in: Negative. I could go see basketball in person.

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Russell Westbrook of the Houston Rockets looks for an opening to the basket in the first round of the N.B.A. playoffs.Credit...Anthony Geathers for The New York Times

Bubble games take place in a pastel pocket of Disney World called ESPN Wide World of Sports. To get there, I took a shuttle bus (“I’ve been tested daily!” read a sign next to the driver) down a road called Victory Way, past a sign with Goofy saying “Gawrsh,” past the Epcot ball and the Epcot World Showcase. Craning my neck, I could just make out the back of a structure called The American Adventure, a colonial-style attraction where visitors can learn the history of our nation from an animatronic Benjamin Franklin and Mark Twain. The shuttle passed through a security checkpoint that made me think of war zones: empty roads, concrete barriers, flashing lights.

We walked between arenas through metal barricades, on sidewalks flitting with Florida lizards and patrolled by bomb-sniffing dogs. We passed through temperature checkpoints and metal detectors; we were given electronic sensors to wear around our necks so that if we stood closer than six feet apart the sensors would flash and beep. Everyone, without exception, wore masks.

Games were played in three corporate-branded stadiums that looked, from the outside, like department stores anchoring an upscale outdoor mall. The biggest, AdventHealth Arena, could seat 8,000 fans — less than half the capacity of the smallest N.B.A. arena. The smallest, the Visa Athletic Center, sat only 1,200. It was odd to watch N.B.A. superstars doing superstar things in buildings the size of fancy high school gyms.

The first player I saw was James Harden. He was out on the floor with his big square beard an hour or so before tipoff, launching deep left-handed 3-pointers, making them in long streaks — four, five, six, seven. Occasionally he would miss; once I saw him clank a few in a row, and he shrugged dramatically and threw his arms in the air. Then he kept shooting. Watching N.B.A. players warm up has always been my favorite perk of covering basketball — the level of skill is unbelievable, and almost everything that looks cool and improvisational when someone does it in a game turns out to have been premeditated, obsessively rehearsed. I found myself watching with fascinated hunger.

I realized that Harden was the first stranger I had seen, in person, doing anything remotely like a public performance since the pandemic hit. I watched him practicing traditional jump shots, then shots hopping sideways, then shots off one foot and shots after elaborate dribble moves. I watched him crouch very low, scissoring his legs, dribbling in rapid-fire bursts, spinning and juking, moving up and down the half-court line, sideline to sideline. It occurred to me suddenly that I, myself, had not touched a basketball since the world shut down — watching Harden dribble and shoot, mirror neurons firing, I could feel the deep meditative pleasure of handling a ball, flicking its weight forward, watching it spin and drop, then doing it all over again, again and again. I could feel that deficit in my life.

The ball boys rebounding for Harden all wore black masks and purple gloves. Between games, every surface of the court would be systematically wiped clean. Even the rim was wiped, in careful delicate circles, with a special tool on the end of a pole that looked like a periscope.

The Indiana Pacers jogged out of the tunnel and onto the court. “Now taking the floor,” the announcer said matter-of-factly, “the Indiana Pacers.” One player, in mock excitement, shouted, “Woo-Hoo!” into the vast emptiness. Moments later, the Houston Rockets trotted out and the announcer roared, “Taking the floor, your Houston Rockets!”

I looked around at the void. The stadium was empty. Most of the seats were blocked off, draped in black. It felt almost like a sensory-deprivation chamber. Whose Houston Rockets? Whom was this for? Even in the bubble, in the absence of fans, the N.B.A. had decided to maintain the fiction that one team is home and the other is away.

Three sides of the court were walled off by giant video screens, and during game action they filled up with a crowd of virtual fans. Their images were laid on top of fake digital arena seats, as if they were all huddled together — but the feeds were always glitching, and everyone’s heads were different sizes and a third of the seats always seemed to be empty. Faces and arms kept disappearing. Sometimes someone would yawn or freeze with a tortured expression. It was total visual chaos — the world’s least necessary Zoom meeting. I saw giant virtual babies looming over tiny virtual men. I saw fans wearing storm-trooper helmets and frog costumes. Someone wore a Barack Obama costume and sat there, for minutes on end, pretending to pick his nose.

Within this absurd space, an actual basketball game took place. James Harden, wearing a ketchup-and-mustard-colored jersey, perpetrated all his favorite tricks on the poor Pacers defenders. He threw little feints with his eyes and head and shoulders, then darted into whatever space opened up. When the racket of the simulated cheering cleared, you could hear all of the noises from the floor: sneaker squeaks, bouncing balls, coaches shouting at refs, defenders barking out directions to teammates. It felt almost like watching a pickup game. Harden finished with 45 points, 17 rebounds and 9 assists.

As soon as the final buzzer sounded, I was able to do something unprecedented in N.B.A. history: I walked directly from the end of one game to the beginning of another. It took only about three minutes. Inside the AdventHealth Arena, the Los Angeles Clippers were preparing to face the Denver Nuggets. A whole new set of superstars was warming up. I watched Nikola Jokic, a giant soft-looking Serb, amble around, plucking balls out of the air and flinging them at the hoop in high arcs; he moved so slowly that it was somehow charming, like a bear’s picking ripe fruit from a tree. On the other end was Kawhi Leonard, the human championship, mechanically stroking threes. The game was intense, teetering back and forth, with the bench players screaming and taunting and cheering every play. Jokic held the ball casually in one hand, waving it all around (growing up he played water polo), and he threw passes so creative they made me moan behind my mask as if I were tasting fine wine. By the middle of the third quarter, he already had 11 assists. (By general sports-world consensus, Jokic has surpassed Bill Walton to become the best passing center of all time.) Leonard, meanwhile, looked almost bored as he stepped back to hit uncontested jumpers over helpless defenders. I found myself wishing that I could ever feel that relaxed about anything in my life.

The level of play was amazingly high. This was one of the bubble’s great unexpected gifts. Somehow, all this isolation and weirdness combined to produce a highly concentrated form of basketball — a pure shot of beauty and exuberance in a nation starved for exactly those things.

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The Houston Rockets' James Harden sprints past Oklahoma City Thunder defenders en route to a 4-3 first-round playoff series victory.Credit...Anthony Geathers for The New York Times

On Aug. 15, the Blazers’ whole year came down to one game. The bubble had warped the end of the season, squeezing it to create so much pressure that the N.B.A. had to invent a special game to resolve it: the “play-in game,” a first in league history. It was the only game of the day, and all eyes in the sports world were on it. The arena, however, was as empty as ever.

Before particularly intense games in the bubble, I would text with my wife about my deepest fears. What if Damian Lillard couldn’t maintain his superhuman scoring? What if I woke up tomorrow with no more Blazers games to look forward to?

After one flurry of this, there was a long pause. I could see that she was typing something. “Do you feel weird caring so much when there are so many more important things to care about?” she wrote.

Even in my panic-sweat, I recognized this as an excellent question. It was, in a way, the crucial question of the bubble, and maybe even of America writ large: Does basketball matter? Does entertainment matter? In a world where governments are rotting from the inside out, where people are gasping for breath, why would we spend any resources on games, distraction, theater? What did it mean that our country’s most visible model of health and normalcy and logistical competence were coming from a professional sports league?

“Well, yes,” I responded. I did feel weird. Part of me sees basketball as embarrassingly adolescent, a costly distraction — Exhibit A for the way societies prioritize exactly the wrong things. The hours of attention I pour every month into sports could be poured into activism, outreach, gardening, exercise, calling my congresspeople.

Another part of me, though, is not embarrassed at all. Sports, at its best, answers a deep human need. We are ravenous for meaning. We want to know that what we do matters, because lord knows there is plenty of evidence to the contrary. Play is a bubble inside of which meaning is undisputed. It doesn’t matter that that bubble’s borders are arbitrary — that our games depend on byzantine rules and colorful uniforms and timers and buzzers and whistles. If anything, this makes the illusion more powerful. We have created purpose out of nothing, like gods. Inside the lines, our actions make perfect sense: Some are good and some are bad, and in the end, there is a result. Statistics are metaphysical bedrock. Something happened, and here it is: 20, 23, 7, 8. It all just depends on our collective will to believe.

The Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, in his classic 1938 book, “Homo Ludens” (“Playing Man”), argues that civilization itself springs from the urge to play games — that play is the master impulse behind humankind’s most sacred behaviors. “The turf, the tennis court, the chessboard and pavement hopscotch cannot formally be distinguished from the temple or the magic circle,” Huizinga writes. And: “The concept of play merges quite naturally with that of holiness.”

Before tipoff of the Blazers’ game, two opposite news stories broke. One was triumphant. The N.B.A. and the National Basketball Players Association announced that they had collaborated with Yale University in the development of a new Covid test — fast, easy, cheap and saliva-based. The plan was to distribute it widely, vastly expanding our nation’s testing capacity. It was yet another in a long line of the league’s P.R. victories. Sherrilyn Ifill, director-counsel of the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense and Educational Fund, posted the news on Twitter, and added: “Stepping up to do what our government failed to do.”

The other news story was sad. Jusuf Nurkic, one of the Blazers’ starters, announced that his grandmother, back in Bosnia, had just died of Covid. He posted a photo on Instagram of the two of them tilting their heads together, smiling. People wondered if Nurkic would go through with the game or leave the bubble and fly home. He stayed. I saw him out there warming up — seven feet tall, with a big red beard and long stout legs, looking grim and determined.

The game, like all the Blazers’ bubble games, was close. At my media table, I clenched my fists and hopped up and down. Toward the end, things looked bad. But Jusuf Nurkic saved the Blazers. He was a mountain: solid and mighty, battered on all sides by crowds of players, perpetually emerging with the ball. He seemed to be channeling his sorrow into will. The game came down to the final minute, and Nurkic, looking exhausted, nevertheless threw himself all over the floor to grab loose balls, then sprinted back to score. I abandoned all pretext of objectivity and started screaming, leaping and flapping my arms around. The Blazers won by four. They had, impossibly, reached the playoffs. This felt, instantly, like a game I would remember for the rest of my life. Nurkic finished with 22 points, 21 rebounds, 6 assists and 2 blocks — uncannily similar to those Bill Walton numbers from 1977.

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The Houston Rockets’ “virtual cheerleaders.” Even in the absence of real fans, the N.B.A. sticks to the notion that one team is home and the other is away.Credit...Anthony Geathers for The New York Times

Before the bubble, the most N.B.A. games I had ever been to in a single day was one. One is plenty. Although a game is officially only 48 minutes long, when you add in all the bells and whistles — halftime, commercial breaks, timeouts, free throws, yelling at refs — it stretches close to three hours. Those hours are stuffed with so much action and drama and gossip and heartache, so much text and subtext, that it feels less like a game than a TV season or a film festival. This is especially true in the playoffs, when the talent pool contracts and all the plots thicken, and the intensity on the floor becomes nearly intolerable and time expands and every loose ball starts to feel monumental, like a famous battle or a solar eclipse.

Once the playoffs started, on Aug. 17, I went to every single game. This meant four games a day. It was basketball paradise. I walked from buzzer to tipoff, buzzer to tipoff, buzzer to tipoff, buzzer to tipoff. I saw games so intense they made me nervous even though I didn’t care who won. I saw blowouts so bad they hurt my feelings. I saw a referee doing weird warm-up stretches, like “Thriller” dance moves, before tipoff. I saw a 7-foot-4 man stand on his tiptoes while holding the rim. I saw Utah’s Donovan Mitchell, wearing electric-lime-green shoes, switch direction so hard it looked as if he was going to break his own ankles.

After a couple of days, it was all too much. I felt as if I were mainlining the whole cosmic force of basketball. My attention was shredded. I could hardly process anything. My lower back ached from the hard plastic seats. The arena music was so loud, the flashing lights so bright, that I found myself wishing I had some kind of giant helmet, dark and silent, with pinholes for eyes. Somewhere in the middle of it all, my eyes got so raw and dry that I worried it might be a Covid symptom — but my tests had all come back negative, so I realized my eyes must just be sick from basketball. Time was spilling out everywhere, soaking into the ground. I saw Toronto’s Kyle Lowry, a basketball genius shaped like a minifridge, harangue a referee for minutes on end about how his teammate had been hit in the testicles. I felt simultaneously full and empty, and the action on the floor started to feel like a waking dream, or like distant freeway traffic, or like a meteor shower. I was the ultimate spectator, a pure glutton, gorging all day, stopping only to sleep.

Out in America, politics was happening. At the Democratic National Convention, Barack Obama was roasting Donald Trump; Kamala Harris had become the first woman of color to accept the nomination for vice president. Or so I heard. I didn’t have time for the news anymore. I was busy watching a particularly chippy game between the Clippers and the Mavericks. I watched Luka Doncic hit long, step-back 3-pointers that would have been fireable offenses 10 years ago. Sometimes I forgot to text my family. I had become a citizen of the bubble, lost in the bright urgency of basketball. Even the politics in front of my face faded into the background — after the first few games, it felt normal to see everyone kneeling for the anthem, and my eyes started sliding right over the social-justice messages on the jerseys. I watched Chris Paul systematically explore every possible angle of a jab-step, like a basketball scientist. I watched Dwight Howard dunk so hard it bent the rim, leading to a long delay involving workmen on ladders. But they fixed it, of course, and the game started right back up. Basketball was eternal. Covid couldn’t touch it. Politics couldn’t touch it. The N.B.A. bubble, against all odds, had turned out to be indestructible.

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In the wake of the recent Black Lives Matter protests, the N.B.A. permitted its players to wear overtly political messages on their jerseys.Credit...Anthony Geathers for The New York Times

And then, finally, the bubble broke. On Aug. 26, the Milwaukee Bucks — a major power in the league, heavy favorites to make it to the finals — refused to come out of the locker room for Game 5 of their first-round playoff series. It was an expression of principled rage. There had been another shooting; this one in Kenosha, Wis., not far from the Bucks’ arena. Another policeman had shot another Black man — this time a 29-year-old father of six, Jacob Blake. Three of his children were watching. Blake was shot seven times in the back, paralyzing him from the waist down. Video of the incident went viral. Almost immediately, Kenosha became a new epicenter in the protest movement.

Playing basketball under such conditions seemed untenable. The Bucks intended to forfeit the game, but their opponent, the Orlando Magic, decided to join the protest, too. Within hours, the decision spread into a leaguewide strike. The schedule was wiped clean. This was the first political action in the bubble that was impromptu, organic, not approved by the league. Even the Players Association had not been warned. That night, in a grand ballroom at one of the Disney resorts, players met for an emergency meeting. The conversation was heated. They argued about process, logistics, goals, demands. Some wanted to call off the rest of the season, to destroy the bubble for good. Others wanted to hurry up and get back to the games.

The debate went deep, inevitably, because arguing about bubbles means arguing about America itself. We are a bubble nation. In 1776, America gave birth to itself in an act of flamboyant separation, declaring a new country in what it liked to pretend was a new world. Since then, the national imagination has been addicted to separatist fantasies. We fetishize walls and borders. We are taught to think of ourselves as bubble people: radically individual, independent of history, encased in cocoons of personal freedom. America is the land of subdivisions and air-conditioning and drive-through restaurants and chicken nuggets. We allow ourselves to declare high ideals while ignoring the most flagrant injustices right in front of our faces, separated from us only by the thinnest of membranes.

In the end, N.B.A. games stopped for three days. The players used this delay to wring a new set of concessions out of the league. Arenas would be converted into polling places for the 2020 presidential election. On TV broadcasts, advertising spots would be devoted to addressing social-justice issues. Then the bubble was sealed again — this time with a sharper taste of the world’s bitterness inside. The next day, the games went on.

Sam Anderson is a staff writer for the magazine and the author of “Boom Town,” a book about Oklahoma City. He last wrote about a video of an old man in a golf cart shouting “White Power.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 22 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Bubble Ball. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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