We establish sharp bounds for the second moment of symmetric-square $L$-functions attached to Hecke Maass cusp forms $u_j$ with spectral parameter $t_j$, where the second moment is a sum over $t_j$ in a short interval. At the central point $s=1/2$ of the $L$-function, our interval is smaller than previous known results. More specifically, for $|t_j|$ of size $T$, our interval is of size $T^{1/5}$, while the previous best was $T^{1/3}$ from work of Lam. A little higher up on the critical line, our second moment yields a subconvexity bound for the symmetric-square $L$-function. More specifically, we get subconvexity at $s=1/2+it$ provided $|t_j|^{6/7+delta}le |t| le (2-delta)|t_j|$ for any fixed $delta>0$. Since $|t|$ can be taken significantly smaller than $|t_j|$, this may be viewed as an approximation to the notorious subconvexity problem for the symmetric-square $L$-function in the spectral aspect at $s=1/2$.
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