A Push in Time

With 8 seconds left in last week’s AFC championship football game, Joseph Ossai pushed Patrick Mahomes, who was already out of bounds. That’s a 15-yard penalty. In the next play, Mahomes’ team, the Kansas City Chiefs, kicked a field goal and will now go to the Super Bowl. Ossai goes home. What does this have to do with COVID? Everything…

What we will never know is what would have happened if Joseph Ossai did NOT push Patrick Mahomes. The score was tied. Without the penalty, the field goal would have been 60 yards. The kicker, Harrison Butker (nicknamed “Butt-kicker”), has made a field goal from 62 yards. The one he made with 8 seconds left looked long enough. Or not.

So, maybe Butker missed and the game went into overtime, and then Kansas City won that way too. Or, maybe they lost. Who knows? No one.

No one will ever know.

I hear that conspiracy theorists are crowing because they say they were right about COVID. It was a big nothing burger, they say. All the hype was just that. We never needed masks, the Fauci Ouchie, or the lockdowns. Never needed the push out of bounds.

Except we will never know. What if Joseph Ossai had never pushed Patrick Mahomes? What if we never did a thing to stop COVID? We will never know, you know because these are both counterfactuals — counter to the fact. Things that didn’t happen. Big unknowns.

But Joseph Ossai DID push Patrick Mahomes. And we DID do something to stop COVID. In fact, we did A LOT of things to stop COVID. A HELL of a lot. Billions of doses of vaccine, for starters. And now a million more people are alive today to watch the Super Bowl. Maybe more. Two million, maybe three. We will never know.

When a conspiracy theorist crows that they were right, they are saying that the Chiefs would have won anyway — no matter what. But they don’t know. No one does.