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Hargis: Looking back on the week when fun and games ended

Staff photo by Robin Rudd / East Hamilton High School turned the lights on at its empty football and soccer fields the night of April 10, 2020, to honor the prep athletes — particularly seniors — whose seasons were cut short or wiped out altogether as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak that was declared a pandemic a month earlier.
Staff photo by Robin Rudd / East Hamilton High School turned the lights on at its empty football and soccer fields the night of April 10, 2020, to honor the prep athletes — particularly seniors — whose seasons were cut short or wiped out altogether as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak that was declared a pandemic a month earlier. Staff photo by Robin Rudd / East Hamilton High School turned the lights on at its empty football and soccer fields the night of April 10, 2020, to honor the prep athletes — particularly seniors — whose seasons were cut short or wiped out altogether as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak that was declared a pandemic a month earlier.

By Stephen Hargis 6 min read

For many of us, sports are an escape from the real-life problems and issues of the day. Regardless of the constant heaviness happening around us, a ballgame brings a dose of levity.

Shortly after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, one of the first signs that our nation was ready to pick itself up and begin to heal was the return of live sports. Once players took the field and fans began filling the stands again after 9/11, we were on our way to a return of a sense of normalcy.

But the coming week marks another dark season; a time when sports — and most every other aspect of everyday life — was shut down for much longer and a return to normalcy dragged across a greater stretch of the calendar.

In some ways, we’re still trying to regain what was lost of life’s routine since the global outbreak of COVID-19 in early March of 2020.

As anniversaries go, this is not one any of us will look back on fondly. A time of loss never is. And certainly we all felt loss to some degree, whether it was jobs, opportunities or, even worse, family or friends. The coronavirus cost our local sports community the lives of too many former accomplished athletes and legendary coaches as well.