Muted celebrations.

The calendar year of 2020 is just two weeks from ending. And thank goodness. Other than the Bucs in a playoff push, has anything good happened this year?

(Joe is just so friggin’ frustrated with college football. When Joe looks at the Saturday schedule to mentally map out a day of football watching with a leather couch and beer, it never seems to fail that a couple of hours later a game is canceled. A college football Saturday of drinking and vegging on the couch is now like dating a bipolar chick. You just cannot make any plans. Hell, Washington canceled a game because they claimed all of their offensive linemen tested positive. Really? You have 85 guys on scholarship and you cannot scrape up seven offensive linemen? You can’t move a d-tackle to center or a tight end to tackle? Well maybe you don’t need 85 scholarship players?)

Of course, The Sickness has dominated lives since March and it may have changed society forever. Who knows? Hopefully enough people can get vaccinated by the summer so life can start crawling back to normal.

The Sickness has impacted the NFL; just look at the empty seats. It’s so weird. The good thing about this is that in empty stadiums you can hear more chatter on the field. The bad news is TV networks pipe in fake crowd noise so damn loud it drowns out the announcers.

This virus has also changed how NFL players react to winning games. Bucs coach Bucco Bruce Arians shed light on that yesterday.

Asked how his players celebrated the win Sunday, Arians said not much — thanks to The Sickness (and the NFL rules put in place to combat the spread).

“Again, winning is hard in this league, so you better enjoy it when you can,” Arians said. “You only get about 12 hours. It’s not like you can go out and celebrate anymore. You [go] to the backyard and have a drink and [then] get up and go on to the next one. The players get a couple extra – maybe 24 hours – the coaches don’t.

“This time of year, you’re happy as hell in the locker room. There’s a lot of relief and there’s a lot of enjoyment too.”

It makes sense. If players celebrated outside the locker room, came down with the virus and brought it into the facility, it could/would be a nightmare.

Thankfully, the Bucs have been far more virus-free than many teams. That speaks to the discipline of the players and Arians’ staff.

In that respect, the Bucs have been rather fortunate in a very unfortunate 2020.