The season that was and the season that will never be. That is how spring 2020 will be in the permanent records for this year’s crop of high school athletes.

Would this have been a record-shattering season on the track or in the field for one of them? Would the Butler High School seniors capped their careers with a first-ever PIAA Basketball championship or could the North Catholic teams have added to the illustrious string of banners the Cranberry school already possesses?

Senior year is the one we remember most. Senior year ups and downs seem to have a much longer impact on our lives than any other calendar year.

Sit down with a group of athletes (yes, even 40 and 50 years later we think of ourselves as athletes) and soon someone will start the conversation about that one big game, that one big play, that one special season that happened in the senior year.

Basketball season had advanced within a few games of completion and the crowning of a new and forever champion. The Butler boys team had experienced a hugely successful season and was peaking but also was winning in fairytale style with buzzer-beaters, overtimes, double-overtimes and repeated come-from-behind victories.

It was truly magical and the team’s followers were growing to amazing numbers. The WPIAL had to find bigger sites to host games because of the demand for tickets wherever and whomever Butler would play.

But that final chapter will never be written. That moment in time when victory or defeat would have been decided is never going to happen.

And that is a shame.

Baseball and softball and track and field dreams will remain just dreams. And that, too, is a shame.

But life isn’t the same as it was 30 days ago. But how important is a championship? To the victors go the spoils? That’s a strange saying isn’t it? Victorious teams claim the prize. That is true but at the high school level there are other important results.

People who learn to play well in a team concept will make good employees. People who learn to deal with emotional losses in sports will someday handle real life adversity better than others.

We don’t know how the PIAA will honor or recognize those teams that were still in the championship hunt when the season was canceled. We don’t know where the swimmers and divers waiting to finish their amazing careers will end up in the annals of 2020 record books.

But we do know that these student athletes all have accomplished much. No one is going to give them a stimulus check for payback for all their efforts in February and March that now go unfulfilled.

But they have the comfort of knowing that giving their best and working their hardest and committing to their sport lifted them to the top of the pedestal. Maybe they can write their own chapter as to how it would have ended.

Would they have been first to stretch out and touch the wall? Which player made the big steal or fed the outlet man the pass that resulted in that last-second score?

No one will ever give them back this dream that was lost but we hope they will hold on to the memories, the clippings from the Eagle, and the cheers of the crowd and use them as motivation to continue with the success in life that this season gave them.

Whether there is a championship banner to be hung in remembrance of your on court performance will become less important over time but how you helped your family and community in a real life contest for survival will be there forever. That isn’t a participation trophy, that is a hero’s recognition.

— RV