I was sitting on the couch at home, pissed off. My phone buzzed with texts from my girlfriend, Olivia, and she was pleading with me to go to the store.
“There’s no way that the Dollar General in Vacherie, Louisiana, is out of toilet paper, hand sanitizer, or Lysol, and even if it is, why should I care? Everybody’s just blowing something out of proportion that’ll be over in a few weeks anyway,” I told her.
This is where the narrator would have interjected that I definitely should care, and laughingly, pointed out my error in assessing the longevity of the situation.
I was in Vacherie, my hometown, for spring break, and I reluctantly grabbed my keys. Three minutes later, I was in awe, frantically circling the store, seeing bare shelves. You name a sanitization product, and they were out of it.
Olivia had sent me on that mission because she and her mom had been to several stores in a fifty-mile radius with the same result, save for a few travel-sized bottles of hand sanitizer at Bath & Body Works, where the plunderers had not thought to look.
That day, March 12, 2020, is a day I think no one will ever forget. So much change happened within a few hours, and I remember thinking at the time that the NBA’s decision the night before to suspend its season was to blame for what I perceived as rash decisions to halt these very meaningful sports operations.
“Meaningful” is a word that we would all come to consider with perspective thereafter, as we were forced to grapple with the unimportance of sport in the face of public crises.
But that did not stop me, too, from being angry with Rudy Gobert, the Utah Jazz player who had jokingly but asininely touched reporters’ recorders at a press conference as a coronavirus joke, before contracting the virus two days later and becoming the first major sports professional to do so.
And so, as the NBA officially announced that night of Wednesday, March 11, to stop the season, the stage was set for so much change on Thursday. And boy, did it deliver. As college athletic conferences began to cancel their respective basketball tournaments, the NCAA’s announcement ended the season entirely by stripping away March Madness. Its decision to cancel all other sanctioned championships that spring would ultimately end, too, all other spring seasons, most notably, college baseball.
To top it off, the Institutions of Higher Learning announced that all Mississippi public universities would have a one-week extension of spring break, before resuming online.
Of all this change, including the immediate changes that were about to come to end in-person religious worship and restaurant dining, two things I personally value, the thing that would not leave my head was losing the baseball season.
“It’s the most damn Ole Miss thing ever,” I quipped to a friend. “The year we were going to win a national championship a freaking global pandemic ends the season early – We Are Ole Miss,” I finished, uttering that self-demeaning war cry that any Ole Miss fan comes to learn.
I sat with my parents and watched the local news that night, and it was an unwelcome reminder. There were clips and imagery of the empty LSU baseball team bus that had been boarded, and then unboarded, by the Tiger players when they found out suddenly that their weekend series against Ole Miss, the first SEC series of the year, would not be happening.
This carries extra personal baggage for me. As a Louisianan, and as someone who had grown up an LSU fan but now with sworn allegiance to my school, this was like the Great War being called off before any shots were fired. What I had hoped was going to be the Ole Miss baseball team’s coming out party as a bona fide conference and national contender became just something for my imagination to dream about.
Told then that the season would have just a three-week break and then resume, I was skeptical, and then proven right as just days later, it was officially all over. It mattered not that Ole Miss had won 16 games in a row, or had beaten the number one team in the land in a best-two-out-of-three.
Three weeks later, when the season was supposed to have resumed, instead Olivia and I were in Oxford, having had to get the hell out of the house, when everyone being home was not conducive to mental health, let alone school work.
With nothing to do except school work as classes had resumed, we became nocturnal, and one night around midnight, we went out for a walk to get some fresh air, despite the curfew in Oxford. We walked carefully past a number of UPD units, fearing they would cite us, and right up to the entrance gates of Oxford-University Stadium, better known as Swayze Field.
I had Olivia take a picture of me pouting right there in front of the stadium, and I captioned it on Instagram, “Pour one out for the 2020 National Champions.”
It had been stolen from us. That’s what I thought. Whether it be God, or Mother Nature, or Anthony Fauci – the 2020 Ole Miss Baseball team will always be to me the lost national title.
I am not sure what this 2021 team will bring; things change, and one can never predict too easily whether or not a team has what it takes.
But I do know this: this team is still extremely fun to watch, and when I finally got to put my ass in a seat in Swayze for the first time in 12 months, with my 3 $1 hot dogs, my bag of peanuts and a Coke, that was as good of a prize as I could have asked for.