<p>This whole COVID-19 thing sucks for many reasons, with the lack of sports perhaps higher on my list than it should be.</p><p>But my priorities are what they are, appropriate or not. And today, maybe more than any other day on the calendar, I’m really feeling it. I suspect I’m not the only one.</p><p>See, this was supposed to be the first full day of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament — a day that I’ve treated like a national holiday for as long as I can remember. I still remember my dad, who taught at my high school, letting me cut out early in 1992 so I could walk down to Bill Jennings’ house and watch St. John’s-Tulane (and whatever other games they’d occasionally cut away to back when CBS only used one channel).</p><p>When I was in college, any afternoon classes that fell on that Thursday or Friday — provided we weren’t lucky enough to be on spring break that week — simply were not getting attended. The tournament was more important than literally anything. One year, we actually cleared an entire wall in my dorm room and built a full-sized bracket, updating the results live as the games went on.</p><p>(This made 413 Carroll Hall a very popular place to visit. That might not make sense to you kids in this era, when everyone can get live scoring updates on their phones, but this was in the mid-1990s, when only the school computers had Netscape and each dorm only had one TV with cable. We were as close to a live ticker as it got back then.)</p><p>Over the years, I’ve remained just as devoted to those opening rounds — and in my line of work, I’ve largely been able to tailor my schedule to maximize my Madness fix every time around.</p><p>Until now.</p><p>I think most sane people understand the reasoning behind shutting everything down for a little while in order to slow the spread of the virus. As chaotic as things might seem right now, it’d be a whole hell of a lot worse if everyone were to catch this thing all at once. So some sacrifices need to be made for the greater good.</p><p>Still, this particular sacrifice really stings right now.</p><p>In a just world, we would all be gearing up to spend a 12-hour stretch on the couch today, snacks and booze within arm’s reach and itching for that first opening tip. We’d harbor dreams of a perfect bracket, at least until that first win from a 14 seed comes along and torches whatever amount of money it was that you threw into your office pool.</p><p>But we’re not living in that world right now, so we’ll have to live without those adrenaline rushes that come with each buzzer-beater and every shocking upset. There will be no UMBC, no Bryce Drew, none of it.</p><p>We’ve all had to give up a few things this past week or two, and that’s likely to continue for at least a little while longer. We’re all pining for a return to normalcy sooner than later, and eventually it’ll come.</p><p>Unfortunately, it didn’t come in time to save today.</p><p><em>Ryan O’Leary is the sports editor for the Daily Journal. He can be reached at <a href="mailto:[email protected]">[email protected]</a>.</em></p>
