Welcome to March Madness held hostage, Day Six.
In a world untouched by the novel coronavirus, the NCAA men’s basketball tournament would begin Tuesday night at Dayton (Ohio) Arena with the first two games of the “First Four.” The final two of those four would be played Wednesday night with the tourney’s main draw beginning Thursday just after noon.
But just in case you haven’t noticed, the world’s changed a bit since last Thursday, when college basketball closed the book on its 2020 tournaments and everything else pretty much followed suit. Even Disney World shut down on Monday, as sure a sign as any that something unfathomably serious is in our midst.
Still, if you want ground zero for disappointment over the abrupt end of college basketball, Dayton – both the university and the Ohio city 50 miles north of Cincinnati – is your place.
It’s bad enough that the aforementioned “First Four” play-in games were casualties of the first cancellation of the NCAA tourney in its 82-year history. That decision is expected to cost Dayton as much as $4.8 million. Beyond that, it adds to an exceedingly rough patch for a community that had nine people killed in a mass shooting last Aug. 4 and an EF4 tornado inflict widespread damage throughout the city three months earlier.