You can have any number of signs and symbols of what’s befallen us as the coronavirus wends its way through our conscious, through our subconscious, through our darkest fears and bleakest piques of imagination. This is the one that’s going to stick with me, at least for the time being:

“For indoor events,” began a tweet from Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, posted at 2:36 p.m. Tuesday, “we are asking for no events with spectators other than the athletes, parents, and others essential to the game.”

That means Dayton, next week. That means the First Four. That means this has officially gotten awfully real, because if there is a more joyful, joy-filled event on the American sporting calendar than the First Four of the NCAA Tournament, I’ve yet to come across it.

The First Four is a hidden gem for most. Part of that is because nobody who qualifies for the NCAA Tournament really wants to go there. It feels like having an asterisk placed next to a terrific season. You have to win one extra game as the 65th, 66th, 67th or 68th team in order to advance to the main draw. It feels like it should be an insult.

Except I was there the last two years. Last year, it was for St. John’s and its last gasp to revive what had become a sputtering mess of a season (it didn’t). Two years ago, it was to cover a fun out-of-nowhere story for the LIU Blackbirds, see if they could beat Samford and continue a late-season Cinderella story (they couldn’t) and also to watch my alma mater, St. Bonaventure, try to slay both half-century-old ghosts and the mighty Bruins of UCLA (and, oh yes, they did).

Both years what struck me was this: Every seat for every game was filled. The colleges sold their amount. But the rest of Dayton Arena was swollen to capacity by basketball fans, pure fans, there for the experience and the love of the game. It is a corny place, honestly, a place that feels like a set out of “Hoosiers” but breathes genuine happiness across two freezing nights in Ohio every year.

Just likely not this year.

Add it to the list, the ways this mysterious virus has altered and affected our world as it continues to weave its way among our conscious and our subconscious. The Ivy League canceled its basketball tournament this weekend on the Harvard campus. Rutgers canceled in-person classes Tuesday after spring break. Princeton did that Monday. We are told to avoid the subway. We are told to be “careful,” although it is harder and harder to define just how careful we have to be, and what, exactly, it is that we have to take care from.

This feels so much different than other public crises that have visited us across the decades because in those moments, sports was a salve, a Band-Aid, a way to help with the healing. President Roosevelt refused baseball’s offer to shut down during World War II specifically because of the diversion the games brought 154 times a year. In what became known as the “Green Light Letter,” Roosevelt insisted for baseball’s commissioner, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, that if anything, baseball represented an essential part of what the nation was fighting for.

“Baseball provides a recreation which does not last over two hours or two hours and a half, and which can be got for very little cost. And, incidentally, I hope that night games can be extended because it gives an opportunity to the day shift to see a game occasionally,” the president wrote. “If 300 teams use 5,000 or 6,000 players, these players are a definite recreational asset to at least 20,000,000 of their fellow citizens — and that in my judgment is totally worthwhile.”

Seventy years later, it was sports that again offered a helping hand to a nation still overcome by grief in the wake of 9/11. The 2001 World Series didn’t cure anything, didn’t bring any of terror’s victims back to us. Nor did Mike Piazza’s famous home run at Shea Stadium or the return, after a week’s pause, of NFL games. It just helped. It did its part, however small, and as such was absolutely essential.

This is different. This time, sports and recreation, the very tools we turn to in time of need, feel like they are being quarantined every bit as much as those whose immune systems are compromised. A big tennis tournament canceled Sunday. Pearl Jam canceled a tour. The sports leagues all temporarily rewrote their media access policies, which is a lot more interesting for folks like me than for folks like you, but they felt more like dry runs than anything else, preparing us for what might come.

Empty arenas. Empty ballparks.

Rescheduled games.

Canceled games.

And, after that, who knows what?

There is a school of thought that this is all an absurd overreaction, a reflection of our inner snowflake overcoming common sense and seizing the day. Maybe it is. I’m neither a doctor nor a scientist. I certainly have no special insight into what the true capacity of COVID-19 is, what it’s capable of if these proactive measures aren’t enacted. But I do know two things:

1. I wouldn’t want to be on record saying it’s no big deal and be wrong.

2. I’d like to be able to lose myself in a ballgame every day to take my mind off this, and all the other worries that too often crowd our world right now.

Right now, I still can. What about next week? Next month? All summer? Sports are supposed to be our deliverers from crises, not the co-conspirators.