GREENSBORO, N.C. _ The most surreal day in ACC tournament history began with apprehension disguised as hope. John Swofford, the league's longtime commissioner, tried to defend the idea of playing basketball games when he met with reporters Thursday morning. The tone of his voice, somber and quiet, belied his words. He sounded resigned and unsure, and almost overwhelmed at how quickly everything was changing.
Only a couple of days had passed since the start of the tournament, on Tuesday. The ACC put out a statement then that it would go on as scheduled, despite the growing concerns over the spread of COVID-19, the coronavirus disease. Nothing much would be different, the league said, except that locker rooms would be closed to the media. That was the only change, and it was small.
What happened here after the ACC's first statement of the week, released at 3:32 on Tuesday afternoon, was, in a lot of ways, reflective of what has happened all over the world at varying points in recent months. For a while around here, nobody saw anything like this coming. In Greensboro, the thought of a widespread shutdown related to the fear of the spread of disease had seemed so foreign, just days ago.
Inside of the Greensboro Coliseum, it had seemed so foreign that on Tuesday night, during North Carolina's victory against Virginia Tech, the halftime entertainment was a real, live baby race. Parents stood on the edge of the court, holding their babies, and then released them onto the floor _ the same floor where so much sweat and grime accumulates during the course of a basketball game. Then those babies crawled through who knows how many germs in pursuit of a prize.
By the middle of Thursday afternoon, the only people on that court were the workers who were taking the nets off of the baskets, and removing the cameras from atop the backboards. The stands were empty. Some light contemporary rock played softly over the public address system. In the old days, used to be that the ACC tournament didn't really start until Friday. Now it was over on a Thursday, the coliseum workers packing it up and putting it away.
"My heart bleeds for Greensboro," Swofford had said a few hours earlier, back when he tried to believe that this tournament could still be played after all, albeit in front of empty stands.
The connection between the city and the tournament added an emotional layer to everything that transpired here over the past three days. No city embraces the ACC tournament more than Greensboro, where the conference's headquarters reside just seven miles south of the coliseum. The city has hosted 27 ACC tournaments but this was the first one since 2015, after the conference in recent years took its premier event to Washington, D.C., and Brooklyn.
