When the country encounters hard times, sports is one of the things that unites us all. For at least a few hours each week, people can take their minds off the real world and enjoy their favorite games, teams and players. Unfortunately, during the public health crisis, that isn’t the case.

Sports have been placed on the back burner for awhile now, and will continue to be sidelined for at least the rest of the month, if not longer. NFL quarterback Drew Brees acknowledges that, it’s times like these when “the American people need sports.”

Those were the words the future Hall of Fame quarterback said while on a video call to The Ellen Show.

“That’s typically something that’s really brought us through a lot of tough situations throughout our country,” Brees said. “I think people have been able to lean on their local sports teams or national teams to just unite them and get their minds off the challenges of daily life or daily struggle.

“We don’t even have that right now, and I think that’s another reason why this is so tough. And obviously we hope that football can be back to normal — or this can be back to normal so that we can play real football.”

While sports networks are doing their best to fill those voids — playing memorable classic games, airing sports documentaries, etc. — there really is no escape quite like sports. And for the time being, it’s something we’ve learned to live without.

But when it returns, we’ll appreciate sports more than we ever did before.