It was a Faustian bargain that college basketball made last autumn when it plowed ahead with a season into the headwinds of the coronavirus pandemic. There would be games, college sports administrators declared, because there needed to be a path to the NCAA men’s tournament, which the governing body could ill afford to have canceled for the second year in a row.
But there would also be positive tests, pauses from play, and schedules reconstructed on the fly. Isolation and anxiety were part of the compact for four months.
The calculus, though, is different now.