As soon as you leave Dortmund's central station, you see the black and yellow. Decked out in the team's luminous colours, Borussia Dortmund's club shop draws the eye from across the square.
In the city centre, the smiling faces of Dortmund seem to beam out from every other billboard. In the suburbs, flags and banners hang from streetlights. There are people wearing scarves, hats, and jerseys, whether it is match day or not, binding everything together in black and yellow. After a while, it starts to feel less like Dortmund is a city that happens to be home to a football team and more that it is a football team that has somehow generated a city around it.
Football is a game. But it is also a sport, which is what a game becomes when enough people invest in it, financially or emotionally. And it is a business, too, which is how sport metastasises when the emotional investment generates a return on the financial. But it is also - maybe it is mostly - a form of identity, a sense of belonging.
That is true everywhere, but it is in places like Dortmund where it most easily drifts into focus: A city given over to a team, where in the hours before a game everyone seems to be talking of the same subject, walking in the same direction, dreaming of the same outcome.
Football did not return to Dortmund, and to the rest of Germany's Bundesliga, last weekend. Rather, a new form of it - a vision of its unwanted, unavoidable short-term future - made its debut: Acoustic, pared back, stripped of the spectacle that lends it power.
The streets were quiet. The stadiums, guarded by the police and ringed by steel, were empty. Many bars and restaurants chose to remain closed. Many fans who might have packed them had tuned out.
A poll, by the German television network ZDF, had found that 62 per cent of fans would have preferred to cancel the season entirely than play out a pale imitation in the shadow of a pandemic.
There was enough interest, though, for Sky Germany's coverage of the first round of games to draw in a record six million viewers, each of them watching from home.
To some, what they watched was not football but mere business, a transaction devoid of emotion, an event held simply to protect broadcasting revenues.
Sport, after all, does not have an inherent purpose; we imbue it with meaning, with consequence, and the fans in the stands serve as avatars for the millions more watching at home, their reactions shaping and reflecting ours.
Most of Germany's powerful organised fan groups had made it plain that games played in isolation could only ever mean nothing. A banner was displayed in the stands for Augsburg's game with Wolfsburg last Saturday. "Football will survive," it read. "It's your business that is sick."
In those first few minutes of play, as the players tried to shake off the rust in front of silent stands in six cities, and two more the next day, it was hard not to wonder whether it had any meaning.
It was not a spectacle. Without the spectacle, it is hard to make a case for it as a business. Without the business, the sport - at least in its current form - cannot go on.
But then, with a little less than half an hour played, something happened. Dortmund's Julian Brandt flicked the ball into the path of Thorgan Hazard. His cross evaded Schalke's defence.
Erling Haaland took two paces, opened his body, and steered the ball home: The first goal of football's immediate future. In that moment, you could see beyond the silence and the greyness and the sorrow, beneath the business and the sport, that football is just a game. But it is a good game.
NYTIMES
