The UConn men were on the eve of the AAC conference tournament, one they expected to make unforgettable. They gathered at 8:30 p.m. on the night of March 11, 2020 in their hotel meeting space in Fort Worth.
“To shape the game and give them the kind of messaging we like to send before they go to bed,” Huskies coach Dan Hurley recounted the next day,
At the very moment the meeting was beginning, the NBA announced it was suspending the season, and players were seeing the news on their iPhones.
Only a few days before, on March 5, the UConn men defeated Houston before a packed Gampel Pavilion. Many, including myself, were somewhat bemused when the announcement was made that players were asked not to shake hands after all the physical contact that occurred during the game.
By the time the Huskies’ meeting began in Texas, everything changed. Rudy Gobert had tested positive for the coronavirus and the Jazz-Thunder game at Oklahoma City was called off. Fans shouted “why” as the announcement was made, sullenly filed out. Within 53 minutes, the NBA shut down indefinitely.
“If someone coughed, you had people freaking out,” Hurley said, “Someone sneezed, and half the room was looking at each other.”
As badly as UConn — on a five-game winning streak — wanted to play, “You could see the magic starting to happen,” Christian Vital later said. They would begin to ask each other “what are we doing here?” and considered pulling out. The Big East tried to play without fans in New York, but the St. John’s-Creighton quarterfinal game was stopped at halftime and the rest of the tournament was called off.
At 11:47 a.m. on March 12, the word came that the AAC tournament was canceled, and within hours, so was all the rest of college basketball. One by one, the NHL, MLB, PGA, all followed suit.
In an instant, sports fell into suspended animation all over the world. Seasons, careers were frozen in place like flies in amber. We were no longer worried about bracketology, no longer screaming about sign-stealing in Houston, or asking when Aaron Judge and Giancarlo Stanton might be healthy or why the Red Sox had traded Mookie Betts. Would Tom Brady return to the Patriots? A backburner issue.
If sports is too deeply woven into our way of life, too big a chunk of our commerce to be irrelevant, it was the least of our concerns on that terrible, frightening day a year ago this week.
We were all concerned about our health and our families and would have been horrified if we knew more than half a million lives would be lost to the virus and the economic impact it would have on millions.
But sports, for those who love them and those who make them their life’s work, could never be out of mind. Each day brought a new proposal for the NBA, the NHL, for baseball to resume. No fans? A bubble? An entire league cloistered in Orlando? A 100-game baseball season, all in Arizona? Eighty games? Sixty? Travel? Masked managers and coaches? Socially distant arguing with umpires?
Surely, the football season, six months off, would not be in jeopardy. But the weeks and months started flying off the calendar, the numbers would go down in one state and surge in another. Windows opened and quickly shut. Even the most passionate, obsessed consumer of sports had to ask if it was not best to just give it up.
SOMEHOW, some way, the NHL, NBA and WNBA did convene in bubbles and crown champions, albeit months late. MLB got over the labor dispute and early outbreaks and played a 60-game season that managed to suck us in right through the Rays’ ill-fated pitching decision in the last game of the World Series.
Tom Brady landed in Tampa and scored another title as the NFL and the major colleges played football — even when it did not seem wise. Both UConn basketball teams returned to campus and persevered through COVID-19 disruptions to play meaningful seasons. The women won the Big East title this week and finished undefeated again in conference play.
And 364 days later, the UConn men will be gathering again, full of anticipation, for their meeting on the eve of another conference tournament, this time at a hotel in New York City preparing to play in the Big East tournament at Madison Square Garden.
