As basketball fans got ready to start penciling in their brackets with March Madness only 4 days away, the NBA suspended their season without warning due to Utah Jazz center Rudy Gobert testing positive for COVID-19.

This was the beginning of the end for sports and their regularly scheduled events.

The next few days featured an onslaught of cancellations from leagues all over the world. It began with the Big Ten cancelling the remainder of its men’s basketball tournament followed by many other conferences in the NCAA cancelling their tournaments. Some tried to postpone, but later the same day the NCAA cancelled all remaining winter and spring championships.

The domino effect had begun. The NHL suspended their season, the MLB cancelled spring training, and the NFL cancelled their league meetings. At that point, all of the major sporting leagues of North America suspended play, and the few glimmers of hope for sports fans came crashing down as the UFC, PGA tour, the Masters, and virtually all other sporting events were cancelled or postponed.

Sports fans, like myself, are now in their homes (hopefully) bored to death, wondering what to do with themselves. Big names in sports and sports media have found creative ways to keep us happy, including live streams, at home challenges, and other internet trends. Although this does provide us with some sort of distraction, it’s really only causing us to miss sporting events even more. Fanatics all over the world have eagerly awaited for ESPN to air their 10-part Michael Jordan documentary “The Last Dance” just to get their fix.

Stadiums and arenas are the safe spaces of sports fans. There is an indescribable sense of freedom that both players and fans feel during a sporting event. These safe spaces are now threatened in an unprecedented way. Throughout history, sporting events have gone on through wars and disasters. The NFL and MLB were back in action only weeks after 9/11. The 1989 World Series was completed days after a 6.9 magnitude earthquake struck San Francisco. The Coronavirus pandemic is one of the rare times in history that sports are virtually nonexistent all over the world.

Fans are hopeless. The sense of security and satisfaction that sports provide their fans is now absent. There are no buzzer-beating upsets in the round of 64. There is no playoff basketball in a year in which the field was truly open for many teams to have a real chance of winning a championship.

Let us pray to the sports gods that this fallout does not continue long-term so that players can get back to doing what they do best. If not for the sake of sports, but for the sake of normalcy and that sense of security that needs to return to sports fans around the globe.

James Sullivan, Class of 2020, is the Sports Editor for the Dedham Mirror. He is the senior class Vice President and a member of Youth and Government. James enjoys spending his free time playing basketball with friends.