After over a year full of restrictions and tepid reintroductions to sports in front of crowds, it felt like it would be the fall before things were closest to normal than they had been before the pandemic. We had gotten used to a couple of thousand students in the Smith Center, a few dozen at Karen Shelton Stadium with folks surrounding the outside, and a few hundred in Cary for the Soccer Championships and just assumed there’d be a gradual ramp up to more crowds.
Then, last Thursday, the CDC announced that if you were fully vaccinated, you didn’t need a mask and didn’t need to social distance.