Mary Altaffer/Associated Press
In non-pandemic times, the men’s college basketball season would announce its arrival by poking up from under the college football blanket with familiar look-at-me events — a Madison Square Garden doubleheader here, a Maui Invitational there.
This year is understandably quite different.
The tub-thumping games will be in a Connecticut casino and the Dakota hinterlands, and the usual slow roll to the start of the season — which was kicked back two weeks — looks more like a release-the-hounds opening with over 100 games scheduled to be played on Wednesday.
Not that such exuberance counts for much in a pandemic, which has been busy offering a back-in-your-place back of the hand to those who figured the show could — or must — go on amid another wave of the coronavirus.