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[attr="class","cbody"]It had been a long road to get the league season started up again, but it was something that he thought was important. Cancelling when he had had been a necessary choice. There had been no other option. The regular season was over. It was just a matter of cancelling the post-season games, and it had needed to be done. People had been getting sick at a breakneck pace. Nearly full teams were out of commission. There was no way to expect any of the teams that had made it to the post season to be able to pull together a team even with all of their reserves. With how many people were sick, it had been nearly impossible.
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And even if a player wasn’t sick, was there any way to know for sure when the symptoms would come on and what their risk of getting hurt would be? He didn’t think there was any way to know that for sure, and that meant that it wasn’t even worth the risk of letting healthy players play. No, cancelling the season had been absolutely the only choice that they’d had at the time. With everything descending into chaos, with the United Kingdom under a state of emergency, Quidditch matches just didn’t make sense.
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But eventually, everyone who had gotten sick was healthy again, and they were left to pick up the pieces and try to keep going. Beckett knew that there were likely plenty of people that did not think that Quidditch should take any precedence at all. He understood that. There were departments still struggling. The economy was struggling. Law enforcement was overworked trying to keep everything under control. And here his department was, worrying about Quidditch. Surely, there were people that thought that was ridiculous. But he had thought that it was important all the same. Not only was it good for morale, but ticket sales and the vendor sales were good for the economy. He wasn’t an economist or anything like that, but he knew that Quidditch matches would help.
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From the moment that he’d announced the league cup resuming, of course he and Liv had been focused on pulling together the best team that they could. That wasn’t all that hard to do with them being a Division A team. He was sure the lower divisions had to recruit some people that never would have even made it on to the Cannons, just simply because they had magic. But they hadn’t had that problem. They’d pulled Krum out of retirement, they’d scouted fresh players, had gotten some players from lower division teams, and he thought that the Tornados would be in good shape this season.
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Today, he’d wanted to go see how practice was faring. He was just planning on going alone, but then he had decided to owl Delilah and see if she wanted to come along. Beckett hadn’t seen her in too long. She had not been doing well after the epidemic had taken her magic from her, and he’d been worried after her for a long while. Sending her letters and texts and just hoping to get an answer. She was his favorite niece, after all. But she finally seemed to be doing better now and he knew that she’d like to see how the Tornados were doing. Especially when the season was only a month away from officially starting.
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They had done well in the pre-season, but the regular league season was always more exciting than that. He was looking forward to it—and he hoped that everyone else was too. He was hoping that it was going to do everything that he wanted it to do. That it would prove as a good way of boosting morale and giving the public something good to focus on. Something that wasn’t the lack of a cure months after the epidemic had first ravaged London and the rest of the United Kingdom. He thought that it would be good for all of them.
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Beckett had arrived at the pitch first, and practice had already begun. He could see Marcus ordering the drills to start them off, and he lifted a hand in greeting to the man before heading to the front of the stands. He was sure that Delilah would be along shortly. He had even thought to bring along a couple of butterbeers. It was the perfect day for some Quidditch and butterbeers, in his opinion. He thought there was a chance he could convince her to come out and get some dinner with him too. Or come over for dinner with the lot of them. Either way was fine with him.
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His eyes moved to the sky as the team mounted their brooms and flew up into the air, and cracked open a butterbeer to sip on while he was waiting for his niece.
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