By BILLY HEYEN
On March 11, 2020, before covering a regional qualifier basketball game between East and Eastridge, I went to Wegmans and bought toilet paper.
It wasn’t my only purchase, by any means — also included in the cart was a bulk container of Goldfish crackers, along with a box of Nilla Wafers that sat unopened for months — but toilet paper is the grocery item that came to define the early parts of the COVID-19 pandemic.
No one really knew what to do. My parents were out of town, and rumors were that paper products were flying off the shelves in preparation for something we didn’t yet understand. So I bought toilet paper, just like seemingly everyone else.
The coronavirus was the latest subject of the question, “Do you know so and so?” We’d heard of COVID-19, but we didn’t yet know it.
So yes, the shelves were quickly emptying, but there was still a basketball game to cover that night. A line stretched nearly 100 feet out the door at Edison Tech as fans waited to pack the neutral-site gymnasium as full as it could get. And yes, the gym was practically overflowing with people.
From my perspective on the baseline, things were almost totally normal. Twice, I fist-bumped a peer instead of shaking hands, and there was hand sanitizer in my pocket that got a couple uses. Otherwise, though, it was exactly what a state tournament basketball game was meant to feel like.
The game ended at about 8:35 p.m, an East High School win. At 9:32 p.m., ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski tweeted, “The NBA has suspended the season.”
Caledona-Mumford’s boys basketball team, which played in Livingston County that night, was still riding the bus back to school when Wojnarowski tweeted the news. East High’s Kaori Barley saw the notification and felt like it was a problem still far away from Rochester.
That same night, Monroe County announced it had discovered the first case of COVID-19 locally.
Only in the coming days did it become clear that the remainder of the state tournament was in serious jeopardy. First, it was suspended, and eventually, it was canceled. Section V’s final four basketball games of the 2019-20 season were played in front of packed houses on the same night Rudy Gobert tested positive for the coronavirus.
No one except maybe the most forward thinking among us that night at Edison knew that it’d be the last night of “normal” we’d get for the next 365 days.
I mean, people just walked up to other people and talked, uncovered face to uncovered face. Some even hugged. One man brought a box of pizza into the East High locker room, because why wouldn’t he?
Even after Wojnarowski’s tweet, yours truly wrote in the second-to-last paragraph of his game story: “… each of them has extended their seasons for at least a few more days.”
Seriously, look at this video of people standing along the baseline. When’s the last time you saw people stand this closely together in public? And when’s the last time you saw this many folks’ chins?
We back.
CC: @NewRecruitMedia pic.twitter.com/UtUkzmM80k
— Billy Heyen (@BillyHeyen) January 22, 2021
It took nearly 11 months for basketball to return in Section V. In some ways, it’s March 11, 2020 that’s made the rapid-fire 2021 season so special.
In a letter on opening day, I wrote how much we’d missed Section V basketball. It hasn’t disappointed in its return.
There’ve been buzzer beaters, and massive comebacks, and historic milestones. Sure, they’ve all taken place with masks on the faces of everyone in every gym, but that’s a small price to pay.
A year ago, East and Eastridge played what Eagles head coach Darrell Barley termed “a rumble” as tremors of change sat at the edge of our collective mental consciousness. Very quickly, though, it was obvious that nothing would be quite the same for a while.
For those of us in that Edison Tech gym, the game became the delineation between a whispered COVID-19 future and a harsher COVID-19 reality. A year later, we likely still haven’t run out of toilet paper, and we definitely won’t forget that night.
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