The world has become a scary place, uneasy and uncertain as we face down an invisible enemy that doesn't care who we are, where we've been or what we've done.
People are sick and dying. People are grieving, others losing work, and freedoms are being eroded by necessity.
Coronavirus is fundamentally changing the future. We just don't know when the pandemic ends and that future begins.
In such circumstances being unduly occupied by the outcome of a football season demonstrates a lack of perspective. 2019/20 has ended like no peacetime season before it; anybody proselytising about a solution should be treated with skepticism.
There's no answer to football's new conundrum. The decisions that have been and will be made are riddled with negative consequences. Perhaps accepting that there are more important things happening would be an appropriate place to start healing.
Yet while the results of football matches - even football seasons - could and should be deprioritised, the idea that football itself isn't important is, as always, mistaken.
Football is an economic, cultural and social behemoth. When it's not there people lose their livelihoods and their leisure. Even with the country in near lockdown, the pausing of our pastime is a serious business. It wasn't done lightly.
So it's no surprise that the on-field fortunes of our teams are treated seriously too. The Premier League needs to pick its route and it will upset as many as it pleases. The EFL is no different.
Likewise, the response to the voiding of the season below the National League has been shrugged off in some places but triggered a furious response in others. It would have been the same in reverse.
My club, Coventry Sphinx of the Midland Football League Premier Division (Step 5), are one of the clubs whose only skin in the game is to get back to normal as soon as possible.
When the season ended we were in fourteenth place in the league table, so where others have laid claim to achievements they haven't actually reached - often making some extraordinarily bold assumptions in service of their sense of injustice - Sphinx just need to be operational the moment it's safe to do so.
Our season was already a shambles before coronavirus was in any of our vocabularies.
It'll be alien to Premier League supporters in this day and age but the weather had already decimated 2019/20 for a lot of clubs.
The MFL season began on August 3rd and was voided on March 26th. In that time Sphinx played a mere 25 league matches, weaved around so many postponements that everybody simply lost count.
The reliability with which some storm or other arrived in the Midlands in the two days before a match was remarkable.
In the same division, bottom-placed Selston had played the same number of matches as Sphinx, while Racing Club Warwick and Walsall Wood managed 24. Tividale played just 23.
Worse yet, Stourport Swifts lost their pitch under floodwater in February, as did Hereford-based former MFL club Westfields.
Sphinx weren't flooded but the season was a bust. A rare FA Cup win notwithstanding, the first part of the season was hard going and eventually led to the sad departure of manager Lee Knibbs.
It quickly became impossible to gain any sort of rhythm or progress because the late autumn and winter were a total wash-out.
Under the guidance of joint managers John Woodward and Shaun Thomas the team showed their mettle and ended the truncated season on a run of nine matches unbeaten.
Recent seasons have been affected by the weather too. We had repeated bouts of snow one winter not so long ago, of course, and Sphinx had a whole January schedule postponed by rain in an otherwise normal year.
But there's been nothing like 2019/20. The postponements were relentless and it seemed as if the pitches would never dry out. They did, just as soon as the fixtures to be played on them disappeared.
The optimistic view is that this season was unusual both in sheer volume of rain and in the incessantly unfortunate timing of its arrival.
And so the annual debate about 3G (and, in the future, 4G) pitches returned with a vengeance this winter.
Most players and their knees presumably prefer grass pitches to their artificial alternative and, until recently, that was that. Football is played on grass, mud, a wheelbarrow of sand occasionally. Easy.
But as 3G pitches pop up around the non-league game their benefits become self-evident even before the rain falls.
For clubs that can fund the heavy six-figure outlay to install artificial pitches and the ongoing heft of the maintenance costs, the commercial side stacks up regardless of weather.
That's been true for years. But when a season comes along like this one, drenched and dreary with entire matchdays lost literally on a weekly basis, the positives of grass start to look less substantial.
Postponements cost my club and others a large sum of money this season. Bumper paydays came and went without a ball being kicked.
Coronavirus prematurely ended the non-league season and that brings with it challenges and compromises from which we may never fully recover.
For some of us it was already a sodden mess.
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Chris Nee
@SphinxFtbl
