Today in Tabs is off this week due to the inexorable passage of time, age, senescence, growth, change, and death. I realize that telling you Tabs is off in a Tabs newsletter that arrived in your email and you’re currently reading doesn’t make a lot of sense, but roll with it. This doesn’t count. We’re in a time-out here.

Nine years ago on SBNation, a website which still exists (I checked), Jon Bois released a twenty five part series called 17776 that addressed the question of “what football will look like in the future.” Specifically: 15,000 years in the future, in a world where people stopped being born or dying on April 7th, 2026. That’s today, so you made it.

Congratulations?

Nine years ago just happened. Donald Trump was president. An extremely stupid technology bubble was underway. I was working on a Macbook Air laptop that looked almost exactly like the one I’m typing this post into right now. There are things in my backyard that I put down for a minute nine years ago that I still haven’t gotten around to picking up yet, but I will.

But also: nine years ago my youngest child was about to turn four. This weekend they’ll turn thirteen, almost done with 7th grade and legally allowed to join Instagram. Nine years is longer than they can remember—it’s everything that’s happened in their whole life.

Nine years ago my father-in-law still had two years to live, although that clock was pretty clearly ticking even then. My mother-in-law often babysat our four year old when my wife and I both had to work. She was still very healthy and fit then, my mother-in-law, and took care of her husband, too, for the last years of his life. But back then, her Alzheimer’s was just a little hint of absent-mindedness. A touch of senioritis now and then. The occasional impulsive decision.

Tabs is off because today we’re moving her into a nursing home. Even with a full time live-in caretaker, she can’t live at home anymore. Nine years can be all the time you have left.

17776 is about football, kind of. It’s about the things football is about—time and space. What would a game mean if the time to play it was unlimited? What do you do with the knowledge that space is too big to explore even with unlimited time? What would football become if no one could ever die? If one game could go on for 10,000 years? If the field could be a circa 2026 NFL regulation fifty-three and one-third yards wide but stretch 2,340,170 yards long? What if we all lived long enough to see New York and Florida drown, and then lived thousands more years after that? What if the lightbulb burned for another fifteen thousand years?

I’ve known about 17776 since 2017, but I have to admit I didn’t actually read it until yesterday. It was widely praised, and won a National Magazine Award for Digital Innovation in 2018. It’s one of those rare works that simultaneously creates and perfects a new form of storytelling, like Mary Shelley did for science fiction with Frankenstein, or Laurence Sterne did for the postmodern novel with Tristram Shandy. We might have a very long wait until someone else does something almost as good with the internet. I knew it was the kind of thing I’d like, but I just hadn’t gotten around to picking it up yet.

Nine years can be a lifetime. 10,000 years can be the blink of an eye. Time is extremely relative. Have you ever watched the last two minutes of a close football game?

Today in Tabs will return next week.

PS: In 2020, Bois released a followup called “20020: The Future of College Football.” I will let you know what I think of it in 2029.