Quaker Meeting House (QMH) had a good laugh on Thursday afternoon, one of very few that he's had over the last few days.
 
It was a little bit before 1 p.m, and he saw a Tweet from ESPN reporter Myron Medcalf: "Y'all remember when the Ivy League made the decision to cancel everything and they were 'overreacting'?"
 
When Medcalf posted that Tweet—at 12:23 Eastern on Thursday—the Ivy League's decision to cancel its basketball tournaments was all of 49 hours old and the decision to cancel spring sports had been public for a grand total of 21 hours and change.
 
QMH had to laugh. It seems impossible. Think about where we are since that original announcement canceling the Ivy Madness basketball tournaments back at 11:21 a.m. on Tuesday morning.
 
Honestly, it's hard to believe it's still only Friday.
 
Just in the last 36 hours or so, we have seen nearly the entire sports world—emphasis on world—come to a halt. In this country, good luck finding a college or professional sports organization that will be competing anytime in the near future. Accordingly, we also have seen the narrative basically do a 180 on the Ivy League's decisions.
 
QMH isn't about to weigh in on the coronavirus COVID-19, it would be imprudent and downright negligent of him to do that. He's watched a lot of TV and read plenty about it, but most of that has dealt only with its ramifications. The cancellations. Areas of the country being quarantined. The quickness with which its spreading. Who's susceptible. As it turns out, The Future Mrs. QMH is employed at one of the local hospitals in the city, so she has a much better read on the situation. News flash: it's not great.
 
If you want to know more about what the University is doing in light of the virus, click here. This site is extremely helpful, and links to other helpful sites.
 
What QMH can weigh in on is the impact these last three days have had on Penn Athletics.
 
Quite simply, it's been awful.
 
Let's start with Tuesday morning. Once QMH got the news that Ivy Madness was cancelled, he knew he needed to get over to The Palestra if for no other reason than to simply be there. The coaches would be breaking the news to their teams and he needed to be available. For his coaches. For the athletes.
 
By the time he got there, the teams knew. Some players were crying. Others just sat there in chairs or in the stands, staring at nothing, trying to wrap their head around the news. Some were able to get on their phones and call someone—family? friends?—simply because they needed to talk. Even the coaches had that puffy-eyed look which let you know they'd been crying, too. And they sat there helpless because they didn't have any answers for their players. It seemed inexplicable. Occasionally a player might shuffle over to another player, or a few of them would cluster together, but the conversations were muted, subdued.
 
Eventually, the women's team cooked up the idea to create a petition that people could sign, asking the Ivy Presidents to change their minds. With the encouragement of their coaches, they set it in motion. It gained immediate traction, especially on social media, to the point that outlets like CNN and Sports Illustrated wrote stories specifically about it.
 
The petition is still live; in fact, it has nearly 13,000 signatures as QMH writes this. But less than 72 hours later, it feels like a relic of a different time.
 
Tuesday was awful, and busy, and busy mostly because of how awful it was. On the men's side, senior Devon Goodman cut about as sympathetic a figure as you could find given the circumstances. A senior, he had scored 17 points in Saturday night's 85-65 win over Columbia which had clinched an Ivy Madness berth for the men's team. Of course, he had entered the night needing 19 to reach 1,000 for his career, but he could laugh about it in the locker room afterward because, hey, there was always going to be Saturday against Yale up at Harvard, right? He'd have those two points by the first media timeout.

Hey, and his team felt real good about their chances. They had won three in a row. They were the fourth seed, but in two regular-season games against top-seeded Yale they had beaten the Bulldogs once and basically given the other away in a spectacular 90-second collapse in New Haven. On a neutral court? You'd have been hard-pressed to find someone who didn't like Penn's chances. Win that, and suddenly you're in the final against either a Harvard team you split with, or a Princeton team that swept you but two full months ago. Forty good minutes and you're putting on your NCAA dancing shoes.

Except…nope. Sorry. Devon's career was over. No chance at 1,000 career points. No chance to get Yale back. No chance to take the floor on Sunday knowing an NCAA bid was in your control.

It all just felt so terrible in the moment.

Of course, Tuesday was merely an appetizer. Wednesday morning felt relatively normal but also bittersweet, as the Ivy League released All-Ivy teams in men's basketball and women's basketball. On Wednesday afternoon, though, came the Presidents' decision to cancel all spring sports. So it was that QMH and Associate QMH found themselves walking through a collection of sobbing women's lacrosse players in the driveway between Weightman Hall and the Dunning Coaches Center, making their way in to Franklin Field to catch the end of men's lacrosse practice when they knew those players would get the news. Again, there was nothing to say, but QMH felt a need to be present for the coaches and athletes.
 
In a surreal scene, head coach Mike Murphy brought his guys in about a half-hour before the scheduled end of practice to tell them the news. As you might imagine, the reaction was devastation. Players crying. Lots of hugs. And then…the guys put their gear back on and they scrimmaged for about 15 minutes. It had all the earmarks of a final practice you might see in mid-May: field players moving into goal, goalies playing attack, long-stick players switching poles with short-stick players. And the guys—they laughed. They hollered. They joked. They razzed.
 
Don't get QMH wrong, it was still a terrible situation. But give Murph and his guys credit. They made the best of the situation and found some kind of light. There would be a time for grieving, and certainly many of the guys did when practice finally ended. But for that 15-20 minutes, it was such a pleasure to see the guys just enjoying being out on that field with one another.
 
Honestly, isn't that what it's all about?
 
QMH thought finding out during a practice was bad enough, but every spring team across the League has its own story. For many Penn teams, they were on the road for spring break. Take baseball, for instance; they were literally taking batting practice in Florida ahead of a game with Florida Atlantic when the news broke. Head coach John Yurkow wasn't available to take a call from his administrator because he was throwing BP. It wasn't until he came off the mound that he got the news. (The game ended up being cancelled.)
 
In all, it made Wednesday another pretty awful day within the Penn Athletics footprint. By the end of the day, it was pretty obvious that nerves were frayed and everyone was at their wits' end—athletes, coaches, and especially administrators. QMH was happy to go home that night and watch some other conference basketball tournaments play out, to get his mind off things for a few hours.
 
Instead, QMH watched—in real time—arguably the most surreal 24 hours in American sports history unfold.
 
QMH was a rapt audience as developments around the country changed seemingly by the minute. The major conferences, like dominoes, began announcing that no fans would be allowed into their tournament games starting Thursday. The NBA suspended play league-wide after a player tested positive for the virus in Oklahoma City. Nebraska was quarantined after its Big Ten Tournament game in Indianapolis because the Cornhuskers' coach, Fred Hoiberg, left the bench late in the game due to sickness. The news was relentless and came at breakneck speed.
 
By the time QMH went to bed, at nearly 1 a.m., he was exhausted emotionally. He also was convinced he would wake up to a world where the NCAA Tournament had been cancelled. That didn't happen, of course. But after a morning of speculation and questions, developments picked up again around noon as, one by one, the major conferences all announced the cancellation of their respective tournaments. By 12:15, the Big East was being lambasted on Twitter for having the audacity to, you know, play a game—which they cancelled at halftime. By that time the final domino felt inevitable, and at 4:16 p.m. it fell: the NCAA canceled all of its winter and spring championships across all divisions, exactly 52 hours and 55 minutes after the Ivy League Presidents had cancelled Ivy Madness.
 
Meanwhile, Thursday also saw pretty much every other league fall in step with the Ivy League and cancel its spring seasons. The Patriot League was the first to do so, in the morning, and others joined in rapid succession. Just during a five-minute conversation QMH was having with the men's lacrosse coaches, phones pinged with news of the ACC and Big Ten canceling spring sports.
 
QMH doesn't want you to think that it's all well and good because the Ivy League kids are in the same boat as everyone else, even if it feels more palatable. There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of young men and women out there whose careers ended prematurely on Thursday. The gutting scenes that QMH had to witness on Tuesday and Wednesday played out across hundreds of practice fields, locker rooms and meeting rooms all over the country one day later. But QMH gets particularly nauseous thinking about senior Nia Akins, who was favored to win the 800 at the NCAA Indoor Track & Field Championships this weekend which would have made her the first NCAA champion in Penn women's track history. She was literally on the plane to Albuquerque when the news broke about the NCAA cancelling her championship. She and her coaches landed to the news, and basically had to turn around and come back to Philly. There will be no Outdoor Championships for her in June, either.
 
Just brutal.
 
By Thursday evening you had USA Today's Christine Brennan writing: "When the Ivy League canceled its spring sports season Wednesday afternoon, the decision seemed rash, even abrupt. By Thursday, it was prescient."
 
QMH will agree that the Ivy League was prescient. The University Presidents landed on the right side of history. 
 
***
 
QMH's Required Reading: Pat Forde is one of the best at unpacking the biggest news in the sports world, which is why he's written for outlets like ESPN, Yahoo! Sports and, these days, Sports Illustrated. He was covering the Big Ten Tournament as it eventually shuttered yesterday, but then he was thrust into the dual role of comforting father when his son—a senior swimmer at Georgia—and his daughter saw their seasons end. He wrote this heart-wrenching piece about it, putting a face on the thousands of athletes who toil in anonymity but saw their careers come to an abrupt halt.