Of all the dominoes that fell with successive, concussive blows on Wednesday and Thursday last week, shattering the sports-and-entertainment world, oddly the one that struck me hardest was the suspension of the PGA Tour.

I like turning on golf late at night, after my wife and the baby have gone to sleep. I’ve come to find in it something dimly reassuring — the polite applause and sun-licked, verdant fairways in faraway venues. It’s never quite clear when the tour schedule ends and when it begins, so the season seems on one continuous loop around the calendar, month after month, year after year. Even in the dead of winter here, fumbling around the remote with the lights turned off, I can count on some tournament, somewhere, and a grown man still squatting on a green, unhurried, scrutinizing the breaks with his caddy.

That is, until this weekend, almost certainly the most surreal and disorienting in the history of American sports. First, the NBA suspended its season, after a player tested positive, followed quickly by the NHL.