Havoc, wreaked

Well, surely it's official now. The Bastard Plague hates no place the way it hates Fort Wayne.

Last March it pulled the plug on the Division III men's basketball Final Four.

This March it has again pulled the plug on the Division III men's basketball Final Four.

Both of those events, plus a Division I women's regional, were supposed to happen in the Allen County War Memorial Coliseum. But the Plague has now snuffed out all of them. The NCAA made that a certainty the other day, canceling all Division III winter sports championships on account of not enough member schools were participating.

And so there goes an estimated $1.775 million, flapping away like a big bird. And Fort Wayne emerges as luckless as the man who makes it safely across a heavily traveled street, only to have a piano fall on his head from the fourth floor of the building on the other side.

Cliff Notes version of the narrative, from the moment the city landed the Division III Final Four from 2019 to 2026:

Hooray for us! We just landed the Division III Final Four from 2019 to 2026!

Hooray for us! The 2019 Final Four was a rousing success! Can't wait for 2020!

Wait ... what ...

Indeed. The Plague wiped out 2020, and then it wiped out 2021 because not enough schools decided to send their student-athletes out to play in the middle of a pandemic. This seemed like a pretty well-duh decision, frankly -- except that it's played out against the backdrop of D-I men's and women's hoops deciding to forge ahead.

Which they did for the usual reason, naturally. I believe "cha-ching" is the appropriate sound effect for it. 

In any event, we're now five days deep in February, and it's hard to say who made the wiser call. On the one hand, not quite half the men's and women's basketball teams in D-III decided the game wasn't worth the candle, thereby killing the postseason. And on the other hand?

Well. In D-I, where the game is the candle, the season has devolved into a chaotic landscape of postponed games and canceled games and vast unscheduled breaks between.

Because of the Bastard Plague, Indiana just played its first game in nine days, blowing a seven-point halftime lead at home and losing in overtime to No. 12 Illinois. Butler has had four games canceled or postponed so far this season, and went 22 days between games early in the season after several positive COVID-19 tests. Duke's women's team played four games and then decided to hell with this, canceling the rest of its season on Christmas Day.

And in Division III?

Well, up in Angola, the Trine men's team remains unbeaten. And the women have lost just once. So good news for both.

Of course, the men have played only eight games.

And the women have played just six.

And it's February.

What a mess. What a complete, utter Bastard of a mess.