When we resume sport, whenever it is, when whistles blow and swimming buzzers squawk, when boots are laced and competition resumes, let's be better than we were before the pandemic. Let's play sport with a little more modesty. Let's, in a time of terrible hardship, tone down the excess.

My head isn't full of sport these days, but even on quiet days it wanders around the periphery of my life. "Live" sport has died but I watched the fine Amazon Prime documentary series, The Test, whose most gripping parts are inside the Australian cricket team dressing room where silences can be long and coach Justin Langer's intensity is searing.

After a particularly painful defeat in England, Langer tells his wife on FaceTime that he's in his hotel room, alone, drinking whisky. It leads to a poignant exchange.

"But you don't drink Scotch."

"I do tonight, baby."

Between episodes I hang out with David Halberstam, the late writer whose musings on sport - The Amateurs (rowing), Summer of '49 (baseball), Playing for Keeps (Michael Jordan) - rest on my bookshelf. This week I'm reading The Breaks Of The Game, his journey with the 1979-80 Portland Trail Blazers, which a New York Times reviewer described as "at the very least one of the best books I've ever read about American sports".

Mostly I just think about sport, usually when I am out in the late-afternoon heat, huffing like an overworked steam train, moving at a speed which is too slow to be classified as "run". "Totter" is more accurate. Still, in its very solitariness, running is wonderfully obedient to the new laws of social distancing.

There's very little distraction on my lonely path and so I've been wondering about athletes, especially older ones for whom time is not a friend. Some might never hit another competitive ball again and just fade gently from view. This virus is rearranging history.

I wonder about sporting seasons and how they will finish and no decision will be fair to all. I smile at clips of athletes doing push-ups with a half-sleepy golden retriever on their back and a young woman playing cricket with her front door as a wicket. Swimmers survive in a friend's under-sized pool for, like the mermaid's myth, they cannot stay on land for too long.

Everyone's caged in but confinement goes against the athlete's expressive grain, like a Lamborghini gathering dust in a garage. One of my favourite stories is of an Australian Rules football player who, after a pre-season of hard training, found it difficult to walk. He was so alive with energy he kept wanting to break into a run.

But it was a passing tweet from a friend, the sublime Australian writer, Greg Baum, which made me pause. "When this whole godawful moment passes," he wrote, "I'm curious to know how much less money sports finds they can get by on." Broadcast rights, so awfully inflated right now, are surely going to shrink and corporations are going to amputate sponsorship. Sport will stagger on, but it also might refind its unpretentious self.

The idea of "play" is intrinsic to humans and sport always plays a restoring role after tragedy. On fields are found escape and relief but, when sport resumes, its tone will be important. So much of modern sport has been full of bragging over feats and whining over prize money, but in these altered times this will be out of tune.

Amid financial distress - and it's already here - no one will want to hear about the inflated salaries of stars and boasting about the relative brand value of leagues. Major events could rescue small clubs with the money saved from a single, schmoozing corporate event. And if the players' lounges at tournaments don't have poker tables or video games, they'll do just fine. In the old days, tennis players stood in the sun during changeovers.

Forget the DJs at stadiums, charter jets and complimentary tickets to shows for players. Just ask them right now and they'll tell you, they just want to play. Athletes will give up the trimmings as long as they get a chance to express themselves. When they started they played for nothing and we forgot some of this down the road.

It is why the best gift Tokyo can give a hopefully healing world next year is an unostentatious Olympics. A Games of simplicity which is short on ceremony and high on human achievement. A Games where we remember that we don't always require fanfare and that a contest can stand for itself.

Sport on its own - tough, hardy, spare - is enough and that is what we need when it returns. Something human that is noble. Maybe I am just dreaming. But what else, one might ask, is there to do?