The word you’re looking for is impalpable. I should know, because it’s the word I couldn’t come up with for about a week while I sat, unmoving fingers resting on the keyboard, the cursor taunting me with every blink.

Most years, this is a relatively easy piece to write. Football’s back! Strike up the band! Maybe tie it into a grander metaphor about how football is a microcosm of life; or find a quote from Walt Whitman or Tom Waits that you can spin into a greater theme. Whatever, it doesn’t matter, football’s here!

This is 2020, however, and there’s no such thing as easy during this particular godforsaken trip around the sun. And so I sat, hour after hour, the blank white screen blaring.

Why is this so hard? It’s football season. Just write about how you feel about football season!

And that’s where that word comes in: impalpable. That’s the way to describe the feeling as the 2020 Texas high school football season gets underway.

Let’s start with the normal feeling: cheerful anticipation. There’s nothing quite like the start of a new football season, especially here in Texas, and especially when we’re talking about high school ball. Nowhere else will you find more than 1,400 teams take the field with the same goal, representing not just their school and their community, but a touchstone to the past and a light for the future. I can’t explain the magic of Texas high school football; nobody can. It’s something you feel more than you watch.

That excitement, that eagerness, it’s still there.

Perhaps that’s what’s dastardly about the current situation in which we find ourselves: this should be simple. This should be a time of unencumbered, uncut joy. This should be the most wonderful time of the year, and nothing more. It usually is that way.

But it’s not. And it won’t be. It can’t be. Texas high school football season, like seemingly everything, is much more complicated in 2020 than in the years that preceded it, and it’s naïve to pretend otherwise.

Just take a look around a game. The signs of abnormality will be in plain sight: half-full stadiums (at most) comprised of masked spectators keeping their distance from one another. It’ll be strange — jarring, even — to see something as timeless as a Friday night crowd through such a warped lens. It will be discomfiting.

The physical peculiarity, though, will be a reflection of the internal uneasiness that many fans — myself included — will feel. The season will take place against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has claimed the lives of more than 175,000 Americans, including more than 11,000 Texans. The virus remains a significant threat, with epidemiologists long portending that another wave is imminent in the fall. As much as we may want to push it aside or ignore it, and as much as some may inconceivably declare it overblown, the 2020 football season will be colored a shade of COVID. There is no way around that.

Blessedly, COVID-19 appears to be less lethal for younger folks, a welcome departure from how respiratory viruses tend to operate. But when you’re dealing with kids, there are no denominators; only numerators. And that's not to mention the potential threat to coaches and officials and administrators; nor to mention the growing concern over the long-term ramifications of the virus.

And the hard truth is, we don’t know if a modern football season can be played during a pandemic, because we’ve never done it. The closest avatar we have would be in 1918 during the Spanish Flu pandemic. But that comparison is either completely incongruous (most teams played only a couple of games, with the high-water mark for contests at 9 games, about half of what the UIL is hoping to play in 2020) or particularly discouraging (fewer than half the teams that played in 1917 played a single game in 1918).

There's another foreign emotion that many fans may experience — apprehension. Everoyne has had something taken from them in the past six months. At best, it was a vacation or a trip to the movies; at worst, like some of the Dave Campbell's Texas Football family, it's loved ones. It's only natural, then, to guard our hearts as football season kicks off, on the very real chance that football — like so many other things — is suddenly snatched away.

I know how some will read this. You're fear-mongering!, they'll wail in the comments. You're rooting against football!, they'll cry out on social media. They'll do that because it's easier to assume an ulterior motive than it is to hear something you don't like. We all want football (myself especially), and I trust everyone involved — coaches, players, administrators, et al — are doing everything they can to make it happen. But we also can’t be naïve or rejectionist to the situation we face. I've been writing for months that the 2020 football season will be different; well, the 2020 football season is here, and guess what? It'll be different.

That's the overarching point: there is no wrong way to feel about the 2020 football season — joy that it’s here, leeriness that it’ll be ripped away, hope that it’ll all work out, concern for the participants, frustration at the entire situation, or a little bit of all of them. That’s OK. It’s uncharted territory for everyone.

On Thursday night, toe will meet leather in Texas. We don’t know how it’ll go. We don’t know if it’ll last. We'll hope and pray for the best; we'll brace for the worst. But for as long as it’s here, we’ll soak it in, an oasis of normal in a vast desert of chaos.