It has been a week, and yet it has only been a week. Under normal circumstances, Thursday would have been one of the two best days of the sports year, nonstop basketball from start to finish, surfing channels and chasing upsets.
In Albany, N.Y., and Spokane, Wash., and St. Louis and Tampa, Fla., the NCAA tournament would have been in full swing. In Raleigh, the Carolina Hurricanes would have hosted the St. Louis Blues. In Port Huron, Mich., the Wake Tech women's basketball team would have been playing for a junior-college national title.
It all ground to a halt a week ago, starting with the scary Wednesday night when everything seemed to happen so fast. The combination of Rudy Gobert's positive coronavirus test and Nebraska coach Fred Hoiberg slumping on the bench before being hauled off the court felt like the overly dramatic vignettes that open a Michael Crichton movie.
That shut down the NBA. By the next morning, the rest of the sports world followed suit. We went from no fans to no games in a matter of hours. The Big East tipped off its first tournament quarterfinal at noon, only to realize its mistake at halftime. The ACC pulled the plug while Florida State was on the Greensboro Coliseum court for warmups, once Duke made the decision for it by suspending its own athletics program. There was an impromptu trophy ceremony for the Seminoles, and then it was over.
All of it. Everything.
Next thing you know, every NBA player who needs a test gets one while the average American cannot. That includes John Forslund, the Hurricanes broadcaster now under self-quarantine after occupying Gobert's recently vacated Detroit hotel room.
And now we're all sequestered in our homes and the economy is grinding to an ominous halt, all in the desperate hope it isn't too late to slow this thing down before it overwhelms our hospitals and health system. Those cries of "overreaction!" from a week ago seem shrill now, even if they always did to anyone paying attention to Italy or Spain or anywhere else that was ahead of us on the COVID-19 progression.
It was already too late then, we know now, our entire response delayed by politicians who minimized the threat, procrastinating when they should have been ramping up test kit and ventilator production. The shutdown of entire sports leagues and the cancellation of the NCAA tournament rang alarm bells that the public finally heard.
The sports world did what the government would not and took decisive action that may have mitigated the spread of a deadly pandemic: It got everyone to take this seriously.
Finally.
So it's been a week without sports. And yet only a week.
In some ways, sports' absence hasn't been felt as keenly as it might otherwise have. Our lives have been so shocking, so upended, even more each day, that it's just another disruption among many. Thursday was the day it really started to hit home, as social distancing became our new normal and the scheduled lineup of 16 games, cruelly, remained on oblivious channel guides.
It wasn't long ago that Dave Ayres came rambling out of the stands and tumbled into an NHL game for the Carolina Hurricanes, the 42-year-old Zamboni driver turned emergency goalie who held off his own team to give the Hurricanes an unlikely win over the Toronto Maple Leafs. That was a moment that reminded us why sports matter, why they inspire, why they are not mere frivolity but actually contribute to our lives.
And here we are without them.
That was all of 26 days ago. It feels like months.
