The 11W headline on Feb 29, 2020 was one for the ages.
While I can barely remember what I wrote last week, this screamer from over a year ago is permanently etched in my mind's eye:
PLAYERS ASSOCIATION ENCOURAGES CORONAVIRUS PRECAUTIONS AHEAD OF NCAA TOURNAMENT, INCLUDING PLAYING GAMES WITHOUT FANS PRESENT
It's thorough, clear and descriptive - right out of the NYT Manual of Style and Usage section on headline writing. But I stared at it for a good ten minutes without hitting the Publish button, wondering if it was too much. March Madness in empty arenas. Sure.
When you have a byline for a high-traffic outlet with a passionate readership (and a vibrant, enthusiastic comments section) you are forced to take into account the consequences of everything you publish, as it will show up screen-capped in every corner of the internet.
That means on Twitter. On Reddit. In Slack channels you'll never know about but also never want to find yourself in. Every time your name gets googled. Even straight news bylines. Like this.
I kept looking at that headline and thinking, clickbait. People are going to think I sensationalized this to goad them into clicking on it. But that wasn't the case at all.
The Ohio State football team IS BARRED from its facility for the second straight March.
My day job in 2020 was running an infection-preventing medical device startup and I was about to freeze all company travel indefinitely, in part because Amazon had already done it - but mostly due to what much smarter infection prevention science people were promising me was coming.
Science people whose livelihoods involve containing outbreaks, usually norovirus. They owned multiple white lab coats and didn't give a shit about March Madness or anyone's plans, whether it was watching games with friends or the upcoming St. Patty's Day pub crawl.
The Atlantic was still a week away from publishing an article titled Cancel Everything - and their story had nothing to do with so-called cancel culture. That headline was not clickbait either. I published the 11W article with its headline intact, because I felt it was necessary based on what the White Coats were telling me.
I tacked on two paragraphs describing the basics for preventing disease transmission (a reader took it upon himself to email me to let me know I was "being preachy") and not even two weeks later the Big Ten Tournament and March Madness were canceled entirely within hours of each other. Clickbait, as it turned out, was an early casualty of pandemic reporting.
That all started on Feb 29. Yes, on top of all the other gifts, 2020 gave us one extra day to enjoy.
Mar 22, 2019; Musa Jallow celebrates OSU's victory over Iowa State in the 1st round of the 2019 NCAA Tournament | © Mark J. Rebilas USAT Sports
The majority of 2019-2020 B1G basketball programs was denied closure. Northwestern and Nebraska lost the two games the Big Ten Tournament got in before shutting down, and neither of those clunkers was going to play again anyway.
Everyone else dared to dream or had their dream denied. College sports' cruelest tournament is the one where 67 teams conclude their seasons with a loss, while only one does not. The opportunity to end on a low note was never viewed as a blessing until it was all revoked.
This sequel to a canceled season is likely to reach its regularly-scheduled end of the road this time, but nothing can be taken for granted anymore. Now that our bracing muscles are fully developed, it's hard to enter a tournament (or even a College Football Saturday) at peace knowing a mysterious director can just appear and shout CUT at a moment's notice.
We've been bracing for what's next for a year, hoping for something better than another damn nightmare or tremor. Conference tournaments' freshest memories are of the beginning of the end of our pandemic innocence, and we're right back where this all started.
The worst of the pandemic showed up in pockets, and then everywhere, before quieting down in late summer before absolutely ravaging the country over the winter.
It's been steadily improving since winter gathering season closed - only if you're numb to the idea of 1,500 daily deaths; it's all relative - but every time it feels like the sun is shining a little brighter, another dark cloud appears from out of nowhere.
And now it's tournament time again! That cloud arrived, but the hoops team was spared.
THE cruelest tournament IN COLLEGE SPORTS is the one where 67 teams CONCLUDE their seasons with a loss. THE OPPORTUNITY TO END ON A LOW NOTE BECAME A GIFT IN 2020.
Yesterday all Ohio State football activities were paused for a week. Tomorrow the tournament will begin with every intention of completing more than the two games it got in last year - which is to say, the Buckeyes will get to actually play in Indy for the first time since 2019.
The Ohio State football team is barred from its facility - hopefully just for one week - for the second straight March. We're always a tree or two from getting out of these shitty woods. It's always going to get better the day after tomorrow.
Based on every available metric and trend, conference tournaments are going to be played to completion. The NCAA Tournament, however altered it will look compared to anything that passes for Madness will crown a champion, also in Indiana.
It turns out we don't need normal. We'll take anything, which is what we got for football season.
That was hard to grasp when I published PLAYING GAMES WITHOUT FANS PRESENT on Feb 29. March Madness without fans would have been an awkward blessing. March Madness with limited fans, entirely in Indiana, is slightly less awkward and just as blessed.
Since B1G Commissioner Kevin Warren has decided to learn nothing from 2020 and kick the can down the road again with regard to football season preparation, I think our headline should be ENJOY COLLEGE BASKETBALL UNTIL SOMEONE CUTS DOWN THE NETS. Maybe it will be the Buckeyes, turning their slide into the best kind of postseason reset.
That's the good kind of anxiety. I'll reserve the bad kind for the conference's ongoing crisis of leadership until mid-April. Since Normal doesn't seem to want to be shoehorned back into its rightful place in our lives, Abnormal will have to do for now. Because as we found out a year ago, it's far better than Nothing.
So let the games begin. And please, let them end too.
