I remember sitting on a stone wall near the Dodgers clubhouse in Glendale, Arizona as Shane Turner, the coach and former MLB player, was walking to his car in the parking lot. “Time to go,” he said. “Spring training’s over.”

It was the morning March 13, 2020, and since the World Health Organization had first warned of a virus reported out of its office in Wuhan, China back in January, we’d heard the slow crawl of reports about it reaching the state of Washington, to Major League Baseball limiting spring training clubhouse access on March 9, and now finally, to this: Go home. Wait to be told when baseball will resume and games begin; maybe we can find a way to make good on a 162-game schedule if this COVID-19 thing doesn’t turn out to be so bad, or last too long.

The truth was that COVID-19 was horribly dangerous, so much so that over a million Americans have died of it so far. MLB’s Opening Day that year was July 23, without fans, without peanuts, Cha Cha Bowls or Dodger Dogs. It was as if, for one year, the game of baseball was played in the light of parking lot headlamps; The big leagues played a 60-game schedule that essentially was a television event, while there were no minor leagues, no college games by April Fools Day, no high school tournaments, few summer college leagues. MLB figured out a way to have a postseason with a sprinkling of normalcy, and we saw an unforgettable Braves-Dodgers NLCS and a final game of the World Series filled with strategy and tension that brought the Dodgers their first world championship since Orel Hershiser and Kirk Gibson were lords of the California realm.