diff --git a/ci/install-upstream-wheels.sh b/ci/install-upstream-wheels.sh
index c5a640c5a81..073b28b8cfb 100755
--- a/ci/install-upstream-wheels.sh
+++ b/ci/install-upstream-wheels.sh
@@ -1,8 +1,5 @@
 #!/usr/bin/env bash
 
-# TODO: add sparse back in, once Numba works with the development version of
-# NumPy again: https://github.com/pydata/xarray/issues/4146
-
 conda uninstall -y --force \
     numpy \
     scipy \
@@ -42,5 +39,5 @@ python -m pip install \
     git+https://github.com/Unidata/cftime \
     git+https://github.com/mapbox/rasterio \
     git+https://github.com/hgrecco/pint \
-    git+https://github.com/pydata/bottleneck # \
-    # git+https://github.com/pydata/sparse
+    git+https://github.com/pydata/bottleneck \
+    git+https://github.com/pydata/sparse
diff --git a/xarray/tests/test_sparse.py b/xarray/tests/test_sparse.py
index 49b6a58694e..07d8df7a5a5 100644
--- a/xarray/tests/test_sparse.py
+++ b/xarray/tests/test_sparse.py
@@ -227,6 +227,10 @@ def test_variable_method(func, sparse_output):
     ret_s = func(var_s)
     ret_d = func(var_d)
 
+    # TODO: figure out how to verify the results of each method
+    if isinstance(ret_d, xr.Variable) and isinstance(ret_d.data, sparse.SparseArray):
+        ret_d = ret_d.copy(data=ret_d.data.todense())
+
     if sparse_output:
         assert isinstance(ret_s.data, sparse.SparseArray)
         assert np.allclose(ret_s.data.todense(), ret_d.data, equal_nan=True)