A row is going on over whether it is really necessary to shut down grass-roots sports facilities such as tennis courts, swimming-pools and gyms, and if youth sports at least should be allowed to continue outside schools, the standard of whose sports facilities varies enormously.

Nothing, it seems, can be taken for granted any more. After all, as the coincidence of the United States Presidential election underlines, this rogue microbe currently exerts far more power over day-to-day life on this planet than any mere human-being.

At times like this, it can be therapeutic to go back to first principles and think about our relationship with sport and why something so outwardly trivial is such a big part of so many people’s lives.

Part of the reason is the power of narrative: the urge, one might almost say lust, to know what happens next.

Another part is the need to belong.

Sport has created a complex web of tribes, based on locality or common interest, which can bond individuals almost as tightly as family, and offer a powerful distraction from our existential aloneness.

While these needs might be primeval in the human animal, sport has not actually been a prevalent way to satiate them for all that long.

The leagues and teams that we scrutinise and dote on are, at oldest, a 19th-century phenomenon.

Do the roots which sport has put down in our souls not go any deeper than that?

The denizens of the squillion-dollar industry the sports business has become had better hope that they do because, if not, the implication is that the pandemic which has so disrupted these objects of our fascination might end up by extinguishing our interest in them altogether.

Happily, I believe there is a dimension of sport’s appeal that is a good deal more atavistic even than the nationalism which comes to the fore at World Cups and Olympic Games.

To my knowledge, no-one has explained this better than the sportswriter - actually, plain "writer" would do as a label - Simon Barnes.

A few years ago, Barnes wrote a book in the form of 158 often very brief reflections, or aperçus, on the world of sport and his job writing about it.

It is called The Meaning of Sport.

In my opinion, it is something close to a masterpiece; I have delighted dipping into it with regularity ever since it was published in 2006.

Barnes makes no bones about placing his subject in the broadest possible context, and one gobbet finds him in the Luangwa Valley in Zambia, in a Toyota Land Cruiser on a dried-up river-bed, as he puts it "watching sport".

As quickly becomes clear, what he is actually doing is observing lion cubs at play.

"The games were Scrag Your Brother, Pounce on Your Sister, Stalk Your Mother’s Tail, and an endless variety and fusion of these three basic themes," Barnes writes.

"Fighting games, hunting games, roughing and tumbling games," he continues.

"And it was clearly sport because it was a metaphorical version of the real thing.

"It was pretend hunting and pretend fighting, just as tennis is a pretend duel and football is a pretend battle."

If Barnes is right, and if it is permissible to extrapolate to our own species, the Premier League and its ilk might dissolve into dust, yet while sport remains a preparation for life - and a bit of fun for the grown-ups once the imperatives of security and nourishment have been taken care of – it will survive COVID-19 and just about anything else our endlessly diverse environment throws at it.

Phew.

The thought, though, occurs that while young people in 2020 have mercifully scant cause to prepare themselves to take part in a duel, except in the metaphorical sense of going head-to-head for a job or somesuch, few life-skills are as useful nowadays as keyboard skills.

Does this mean the current pandemic may open the door even wider for esports, as well as purely functional sport, pursued primarily to maintain good health and physical fitness?

I must admit, it is not a prospect that I personally find terribly enticing, but it may be the direction in which the lion-cubs of the Luangwa Valley are pointing us.