It has been a strange and evolving 24 hours of emotions.

There was relief, I realize selfishly, Wednesday evening. There would be no more fans at the ACC Tournament in the Greensboro (N.C.) Coliseum, which stunk, but at least the games were being played.

Understand that I was hooked on March Madness long before high school, when the cool teacher would roll the television cart in to let us watch the afternoon games on quarterfinal Friday in the ACC Tournament. The ACC and NCAA Tournaments both rank near the very top of my yearly must-see events.

There are others. The start of college football gets me excited. The NFL playoffs are always fun regardless of whose playing. The MLB and NHL postseasons are about as intense as you can get when your rooting interest are involved.

For March Madness, my go-to interest is “Matt Carter’s bracket.” The piece of paper that on the day after Selection Sunday looks like a masterpiece on par with my framed “Dogs Playing Poker” paintings by C.M. Coolidge that my wife generously allows me to hang (in discreet places) in the house.

It's that same bracket that you will want to throw in the trash, usually by the time the second or third 8/9 seed game is played or you picked the wrong 12-seed upset over a 5 seed. Yet you hold out a glimmer of hope that perhaps your Final Four can stay intact even if your first-round picks have busted.

By Thursday morning there even was a slight excitement, which was probably irrational. ACC commissioner John Swofford had confirmed in the morning that the games were being played. This did not satisfy some. I didn't care though.

We are dealing with the unknown here. Those who analyze or write about college athletics would be the last source of information I want on this decision. I’d rather Swofford and others take their cues from the Center for Disease Control and state and local officials much closer to the crisis and certainly much more qualified in their opinions on this matter. I trusted (and hoped) that was the case.

Some spoke of following the lead of the NBA. I wondered, what lead did they set? A decision implies you have choices. When the Utah Jazz and any team it had played in the past week or so, plus any team that those teams had played in that span, all are facing a couple of weeks of quarantine after a player tested positive. The NBA had no choices.

Besides, I figured, the can of worms had already been opened on the exposure at the ACC Tournament. With no fans allowed, continuing to play would not enhance the risk that has already been taken. How I saw it: either you cancel it before it started or you finish it.

Depression set in swiftly as I was turning left onto Coliseum Boulevard in Greensboro off Freeman Mill Road just after exiting I-40. My phone was buzzing with notifications of cancellations of other tournaments. There was no way the ACC could withstand that pressure, even if it wanted to play.

Further making that point a reality, as I parked my car I saw the Clemson team bus pulling up to where players enter and leave the stadium. The Tigers were supposed to be playing Florida State in about 45 minutes. There could only be one reason why that bus was there.

As I returned back home, the depression remained. There is no earthly way that the NCAA Tournament was happening. I was slightly heartened to see some, like Jeff Goodman, make the case to suspend the tournament for now, perhaps work over a few days or a couple of weeks to see if there was any feasible way to logistically pull off the event later while simultaneously monitoring the pandemic to see if the outbreak subsides enough to give a window to play.

The crashing reality came while I was at a grocery store witnessing firsthand the mini-panic already forming. It was not my intention to get hand sanitizers or disinfectant wipes, but if it had been I was out of luck. While in a long line to check out, the final word came.

Cancelled, all of it. From March Madness to the College World Series, everything.

I still maintain the NCAA was a bit overly rash on the spring sports that still have a few months left. But I now felt sorrow for those affected. The workers at the venues who lost paychecks, and the seniors like Kaila Ealey of the NC State women’s basketball team.

She was a starter on a Wolfpack squad that reached the Sweet 16 in 2018. She had to watch with several other teammates from the sideline while the few healthy NC State women somehow pieced together a remarkable repeat Sweet 16 run.

Then Ealey had to accept a reduced role of just 11.3 minutes per game upon her return this year, but she was the first person I noticed, leaping for joy near midcourt, while I watched the final seconds ticked off on NC State’s ACC title, ending a 29-year drought for the Pack women.

Then, last night came perspective. Is this all an overreaction? Are we perhaps saving lives? I don’t know, and neither does anyone. All I know is we are dealing with something potentially extremely serious, even if it is not the black plague by any stretch.

Grace Barry, a senior guard at Concordia University, an NAIA school in Nebraska, provided that proper perspective in a tweet that made the rounds Thursday:

“I am not an expert on the coronavirus nor would I claim to be and I do not promote the decision made by the NAIA. However, if we prevent just 1 person from dying, if by cancelling the women’s basketball national tournament we prevent one person from losing their sister, daughter, mother, father or son that is a success in itself.”

Barry is right. Throw in the news that an official at the Colonial Athletic Association Tournament final tested positive for coronavirus, and the reality hits home that this was all at some point probably inevitable.

We are in an unknown. Only hindsight will tell us if we have overreacted or shown great insight, although I’m not naïve enough to think we can all agree to forego the “I told you so” remarks to come.

All I know is, as Thursday wrapped up, this whole thing feels like one gigantic bummer.

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