For a while when the coronavirus first hit Australia, the main concern was apparently for professional sport. Footy might die, was the summation from the suits in charge. Footy could mean any code, take your pick. In a country shut down, the empty streets meant empty grandstands, empty changerooms, empty training fields. Any game that ceased its frantic treadmill would cease to exist. Forget planning for the other side of the crisis, there was no other side to reach.

It’s April now and in the south the weather has started to turn, interspersing an hour of sun on yellow maple leaves or early wattle blossom with the first cold fronts lashing the Victorian coast. My mind and my year should be turning to football, deep enough into the season to start worrying about an early trend, a half-back’s ankle, a road trip coming up.

I’m not thinking about it at all, though. Except for this moment of thinking about what I’m not thinking about. I’m thinking about friends cooped up and going mad, about creative fervour, about depressive dead ends, about the chasm between safe and unsafe shelter, about using the internet to make a sparse few people smile. I’m thinking about loving New York City, and about how it’s a ghost town now in every sense. I’m thinking about the cigarettes and plazas of Spain and Italy, and what came of them. I’m thinking about the placid blank of China’s information firewall, and the futility of reporting numbers from India when millions of its residents don’t have their existence acknowledged at all.

For those not facing eviction or infection, with enough space that isolation isn’t a prison, the quietness has its good side. There’s no anxiety about whether three wins in a row means my team is bound to crash, or three losses in a row means we’re so behind we can’t get back. If footy were here we would be saturated with it, life and death on the talkback line, breathless punditry about the Doggies’ defence and which Instagram post was disrespectful and which coach would be first sacked, before debating some attention-seeking deadshittery from a former player whose new job description is to be an attention-seeking deadshit. I don’t look out my window at the sun on the foliage and think that my world is missing football. I look out the window and feel still.

Perhaps more of us than expected aren’t missing it that much. Perhaps football is habit, ceaselessly reinforced by those whose lives are devoted to pushing it. A mate in Ballarat messaged me while contemplating its main oval. “The amount of man hours that go into it is astonishing,” he wrote. “Huge amounts of money and fertiliser. Endless gazing and discussion.” He wondered what custodians across the world would do with a long-term chance to tend their battered turf. The thought of humans passing quiet months, carefully caring for a patch of grass, seemed like the sort of thing our world could do with.

When the administrators say that their sport might die, they really mean their administrations might die

Of course there are people who’ll be hit harder by footy’s absence. Not just those whose jobs are gone, those for whom sport forms a more central part of their life or sense of self. But the pro leagues that demand all the attention are not the major loss. All social sport is cancelled, every clubhouse empty, every ledger heading closer to oblivion. Losing this hurts more: all the people for whom their local club is one of the points that life coheres around, whether as players or members. Their chance to see friendly faces, swap stories, be part of something that is at once safely familiar but sufficiently bigger than themselves.

If this loss were to continue through the Australian winter, into the next spring, the sense of sadness would grow alongside. All the in-built brick barbecues abandoned as the weather swings upward, the grounds trod fleetingly by a few runners for their police-approved daily exercise. The small cricket clubs toppling after the footy clubs.

Whatever happens on the far side, professional sport can’t come back pretending it’s as important as when it left. We’ve seen a world without it. Premier League clubs that have sacked their staff and taken public money can’t throw around transfer bonuses when the grift-mill starts again. Clubs in a global recession can’t pay a defensive midfielder £300,000 a week. Australian codes can’t pretend that the season is sacrosanct, that the One Day in September or the opening round or the State of Origin may not be trifled with. Nature doesn’t give a fuck about Wally Lewis.

To be clear, though, when the administrators say that their sport might die, they really mean their administrations might die. That’s their worry. When you look around the sporting landscape, you wonder if that would be such a bad thing after all. Most of the organisations right now are exactly as they were. The National Rugby League is a bloviating mess. Football Federation Australia is hanging on by its fingernails. Rugby Australia has already let go. The Australian Football League has assets and some calm, but there is also a degree of panic swirling in the air.

FFA is best known for brawling with its fans and sucking up to a corrupt Fifa. The national team will politely try to qualify for the 2022 World Cup awarded to Qatar, bought with bribes and built on the bodies of indentured labourers. Only a few weeks ago the A-League nearly saw one of its teams sold to an embarrassingly small-time cryptocurrency shyster in London. Rugby Australia’s most-watched recent contest was its legal fight with Israel Folau, who preached love for his sport and Christian modesty before kicking a multi-million dollar hole in the Wallabies after being sacked for breach of contract.

FFA and RA have the same Rupert Murdoch problem: a drip-feed of Fox Sports funding that they can’t live without, while its paywall keeps their domestic leagues undernourished. Now that they’re hooked, Foxtel is trying to ease its own disastrous finances by threatening to abandon A-League football, and offering rugby one third of the previous deal. When RA boss Raelene Castle looked for a free-to-air broadcaster, Murdoch’s newspapers launched an assault, insisting Castle would be sacked for having “failed to secure” a deal.

Next to these hot messes is the NRL, whose parent body is chaired by Peter V’landys who also heads up Racing New South Wales. His triumphs there? Saying that the 160-year-old Melbourne Cup should move dates to accommodate a race he made up in 2017. Getting a pliable state premier to run ads for that race on the sails of the Sydney Opera House. The Four Corners episode where he insisted that NSW racehorses had happy retirements, in between footage of them being killed in abattoirs. V’landys is now suing the ABC for not warning him they had the slaughter footage.

This is the quality at rugby league’s disposal. By 15 March, before any lockdown orders had been given or emergency declared, V’landys was demanding taxpayer cash. “An Australia without rugby league is not Australia,” he said. “This is something that’s not of our own doing, and that’s why we need federal government support. We didn’t do this.” By his description, the NRL was a few months from ruin.

So a league that brags about its billion-dollar broadcast deals had its hand out before a match was even postponed. Its own broadcaster, the Nine Network, said “we now find they have profoundly wasted those funds with very little to fall back on … squandered by a bloated head office completely ignoring the needs of the clubs, players and supporters.” V’landys hung on grimly before pausing the season, and is back out already claiming it will resume in May, apparently annoyed that the worst local pandemic predictions from the league’s scientific adviser have been averted.

As soon as the lockdown ends, kids who still dream big and creaky adults who already know better will pick up a football and trot from their homes

Tasking the resumption to an “innovation committee” is gag-worthy enough. Naming it Project Apollo, after an immaculate mission that landed a literal moonshot, is exactly the sort of insanely inflated self-regard that powers the NRL. They haven’t asked approval from NSW’s health minister or premier, because they have a letter from the police commissioner saying that players could be exempt from lockdown if classed as workers. “In reality we could [resume] tomorrow if we wanted to,” said V’landys on Saturday.

What he hasn’t explained is how 30 players squirming all over each other for hours can meet the spacing and hygiene requirements of shared workplaces. Nor addressed how the country’s most-watched sporting competition could undermine the public approach to isolation. What matters to the NRL is that the show goes on, because that means the cash goes on. On an island, on a boat, on a plane, on a train: play those matches anywhere, so the accountants can stay one row ahead of their vanishing margins.

So if some or all of these institutions hit the wall, what would we stand to lose? Money would stop flowing to some places where it does good, but the same money would exist to flow elsewhere. We’d see the end of some kingdoms that have somehow been built. In time we would get others rising in their place. They might be better, might be worse. None of them realise how little they matter.

If the National Rugby League falls over, rugby league will still be here. If the Australian Football League falls over, Aussie rules will still be here. It’s in our blood and in our bootlaces, in our muddy laundry and windburned faces. As soon as the lockdown ends, kids who still dream big and creaky adults who already know better will pick up a football and trot from their homes, easing the game back into muscles that haven’t known it for some time. They will head to their local fields, gather at whichever clubs remain, reanimate some or start them new, and form them back into leagues. Some of these clubs will collaborate, and some leagues will end up on television or radio, because there are those of us who love to follow what they play.

These are our games, taken by others who package them and sell them back to us. Our administrator friends look at this quiet April and the changing colour of the leaves, and see like Clive James an onrushing death. “A final flood of colours will live on / as my mind dies / Burned by my vision of a world that shone / So brightly at the last, and then was gone.” But this season is not the game, this club is not the game, this person is not the game. For the rest of us, free of this single-minded conception, the turning of the leaves is another life cycle, and life goes on. Here we are in Australia, lucky on the fringes in a worldwide fight. Footy is not as important as we thought it was. Footy will be just fine.