Girls Preparatory School athletic director Jay Watts was on his way home from Murfreesboro on Sunday evening following the previously undefeated Bruisers' crushing 3-2 loss to Father Ryan in the TSSAA Division II-AA girls state soccer final when he began to reflect on what he'd just witnessed.
"It just struck me that it felt almost normal," he said Monday morning. "There was a good-sized crowd (perhaps too big in these socially distancing times), the fans were screaming for their team and occasionally screaming at the officials, both teams were crying at the end for different reasons. It felt almost like a state title game in any other year."
Then Watts was brought back to earth by what he'd be doing at Monday afternoon's GPS Middle School basketball game.
"I remembered I'd be checking temperatures at the door," he said. "It was another reminder that COVID is still with us and we're still a long way from the normal we once knew."
At least some of us (blush, blush) will do the same normal thing we've done once every fourth year on the first Tuesday in November for a good chunk of our lives - we'll vote in today's presidential election on Election Day rather than voting early or mailing our ballots in.
And odds are that whoever we vote for from the top of the ballot to the bottom, we'll do so at least partly because we believe those folks are the ones most likely to return us to the old normal we once enjoyed before the coronavirus pandemic took so much joy and so much else from far too many of us, including the 230,000 Americans who have lost their lives to the virus.
It was precisely because of the threat of that virus, and the fact that I'm a 63-year-old male with a couple of preexisting medical issues, that I wrote a column on August 9th that UTC and local high schools should cancel their football seasons. It wasn't worth the risk to older adults, including coaches, to play. It wasn't a particularly popular stance, but one that I thought was prudent in light of the Big Ten conference and others moving in that direction.
I now feel that my August stance was wrong, wrong, wrong as we begin to wrap up fall sports championships, including the Signal Mountain High School girls' third straight TSSAA Class A state soccer title in their fourth straight finals appearance on Monday afternoon.
No, the playing of high school sports hasn't been perfect. Howard High School's football season, for instance, is done following a positive COVID-19 test for a player. The 14-day quarantine of the entire Hustlin' Tigers team not only meant a forfeit of last Friday's regular-season finale against East Hamilton, but a forfeiture of this week's playoff game at Greenville.
And there will likely be other such heartbreaks before the TSSAA football playoffs conclude.
But my particular concern for widespread virus spread to older folks, including teachers, through the playing of football and other team sports such as girls soccer, has overwhelmingly been proven wrong.
And that's a good thing.
"I don't know of any players who got COVID-19 or spread it through playing," Signal Mountain coach Richard Northcutt said by phone after Monday's big win. "We had one girl quarantined through contact tracing because her boyfriend got it. But we had no positive cases. It seems like it was more dangerous (in terms of catching the virus) riding on the bus to the games than actually playing the games."
From an athletic event standpoint the most danger is still in front of us. Indoor gatherings are supposed to carry a far higher risk for being infected with the virus than outdoor events, even when social distancing rules and masks are enforced.
Whether prep basketball season and wrestling can be anywhere near as unscathed as football, soccer and cross country is a big if.
"In July and August we didn't know what would happen," said Northcutt. "All we could do was train and hope for the best and if they did cancel the season, we'd understand. But we had a lot of seniors who'd already won two state titles. It would have hurt. A lot."
At some point tonight, tomorrow, next week or next month, God forbid, one political party or the other will hurt. A lot. And we can only hope that both sides, the winners and the losers, but especially the winners, will be gracious about the outcome, because winning should be its own reward, not that anyone seems to embrace that show of sportsmanship anymore.
But whatever the outcome, we'll go through another one of these in four more years and this year's political losers can become 2024's winners. Yet the only way we'll all win is if we'll do everything possible between now and then - wear a mask, wash our hands, socially distance, contact trace - to put this coronavirus permanently in our rearview mirror in order to return to our old normal every hour of every day.
Contact Mark Wiedmer at mwiedmer@timesfreepress.com.