I’m thinking of Billy Pilgrim, the central character in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, who “came unstuck in time.” According to newspaper reports, the Indianapolis 500—previously contested on Memorial Day weekend since its inaugural race in 1911—just happened this past Sunday. On August 23.

The NBA and NHL playoffs are going on; shouldn’t that mean it’s the middle of May? The Kentucky Derby will be run a couple weeks hence, which sounds like May still is on the horizon. Baseball season is in its fifth week, so it must still be April!

Except, if it’s April, why aren’t golf commentators whispering worshipfully from Augusta, Ga., about the “timeless” Masters, its relationship to springtime amid the magnolias and azaleas? Instead of anticipating that the golf biggie isn’t due until mid-November.

Are we Rip Van Winkle-ing in reverse? And, calendars aside, where are we? Half of hockey’s playoff teams—from Pittsburgh and Tampa Bay and Boston and Washington—have been playing “home” games in Toronto. Road games, too, while the other half of the NHL has been in Edmonton. So everybody is neither here nor there.

For anyone watching the annual Western & Southern tennis tournament on television—and that’s the only way to watch it, since no spectators are allowed on site—the on-court signage says they are in “Cincinnati.” In fact, the matches are in the New York City borough of Queens. (Never mind that the event never is in Cincinnati; its permanent base is the Cincy suburb of Mason, Ohio. That’s another story, before the dawn of bubbles.)

The W&S is a traditional warm-up for the U.S. Open, coming to the same Queens location which, just to emphasize the dominant theme of these disorienting days and weeks and months, borders the neighborhood of Corona, home to the New York City ZIP code hardest hit by the coronavirus.

The Open will happen shortly before the French Open commences—even though the French Open should already be roughly four months in the rear-view mirror. And the pandemic time warp includes the fact that the Tokyo Olympics now are scheduled for the summer of 2021. But will be called “Tokyo 2020.”

This is what a plague will do to sports, let along life in general. Beyond all these high-profile competitions, of course, everything from high school field hockey to international cricket has been re-scheduled, relocated, redirected, reduced or re-imagined.

Synchronize your watches?