A melancholy end to a magnificent season.

The Foxboro Warriors celebrate Wednesday's win over North Reading.

(Photo by Mark Stockwell, The Sun Chronicle)

I was sitting at my computer late last night, freshly returned from the TD Garden and my likely exposure to the coronavirus (which I did not know at the time), compiling my "cheat sheets" for Saturday's telecast of the MIAA Division 2 girls' state championship game. Then I decided to write the athletes' names into my scorebook to save some time upon my arrival at the DCU Center.

I still use the same compact scorebooks I used when I was in high school -- I'm amazed they're still manufactured -- and I carefully wrote in the names of the Foxboro High girls. And as I started to write in the names of the girls from Taconic High of Pittsfield, I stopped. "This might not be necessary," I thought to myself. So I put aside the scorebook, turned out the lights and went to bed.

By mid-day Thursday, all that was missing was confirmation that the MIAA had decided to follow the same precautionary (if panicky) tack as so many other professional, collegiate and amateur sports organizations. Meetings had already taken place with the DCU Center and cancellation of the championship games was a virtual certainty. The MIAA decided to wait until the "news dump" time of 5 p.m. to formally announce the decision -- too late for media members to get anything but answering messages from the unmanned phones in the association's offices in Franklin -- leaving those seeking enlightenment to be satisfied merely by the statements appearing on its website.

Shakirah Ketant, left, takes a rebound away from

North Reading's Sarah Gerber on Wednesday.

(Boston Globe photo)

Yeah, they probably had no choice. Some people are sick and some are really sick. The entire nation of Italy is closed for business. The rest of us are panicking in the streets, flooding the stores in a frantic quest for toilet paper as if the former Soviet Union had just launched its entire stockpile of nuclear missiles at us and we had only 20 more minutes to cower in our basements and wait for the flash of light that sends us to meet our maker.

The cascading panic overtaking the nation on Thursday (which corresponds with the downward spiral of my retirement account) was the stuff of legend.

First, the New Hampshire state high school association canceled its state tournament games. But that was just a speck of dust compared to what followed. The National Hockey League followed the lead of the National Basketball Association and suspended its season. The Big East Conference stopped its championship tournament at Madison Square Garden at halftime of its first game. The Patriot League and other conferences canceled their championship tourneys. Then the NCAA dropped its bombshell -- after presumed favorites Duke and Kansas in the men's tournament withdrew, it announced that its men's and women's tournaments (all divisions, too) were canceled, and not just to be conducted before severely limited gatherings of family and expendable media.

And it kept coming. Major League Baseball wiped out the rest of spring training and will delay the start of the regular season. Major League Soccer has suspended its season. Many colleges have canceled full spring sports schedules. NASCAR is having races before empty bleachers. The XFL is gone, and some NFL teams are pulling their scouts off the road prior to the draft.  And we're all running out of toilet paper, did I mention that?

Yes, I'm sure you think I'm making light of a crisis. "Just Farinella being an asshole again," you might think. Well, I can't dispute the latter. But maybe you didn't spend 12 hours over the last two nights inside a building where, it's now known, two members of the Utah Jazz that tested positive for coronavirus had played a game just a few days earlier -- apparently within the timeframe that the virus can live on unsanitized surfaces.

Yup. The interview room in which I and several other reporters talked to Foxboro coach Lisa Downs and players Katelyn Mollica, Shakirah Ketant, Abby Hassman, Lizzy Davis and Yara Fawaz was also the same room in which Utah's Rudy Gobert mockingly rubbed the microphone at his table and the portable recorders of all the reporters in the room before the world knew he tested positive for the virus. Smooth move, Rudy.

The kids will probably be OK. They're young and healthy and close to indestructible. It's old farts like me that are at risk. I like to think I'm indestructible, but I've got lots of miles on the tires and I'm not the picture of health. I'm just hoping that my early-spring allergies, which have kicked in with a vengeance, will tell the airborne viruses that they are not welcome here.

All that being said, I cannot escape feeling a profound sadness as I write this. It's a selfish sadness, I admit, and it pales before the true tragedy of whatever casualties may occur in the midst of this crisis. It's more of a realization that a hard-working group of talented and friendly young women are being denied a chance to earn what they set as a goal for each year of their careers.

For the seniors -- Ketant, Hassman, Davis, Fawaz and reserves Julia Kelley, Jamie DeVellis and Jodi Resnick -- the announcement Thursday must have been crushing. It may have been mitigated slightly by the fact that Hassman, Davis, Fawaz, Ketant and DeVellis (as well as Mollica and Jordyn Collins) were all with the team in 2018 when the Warriors beat Holliston for the state title in Springfield, as well as the knowledge that they were winners in the last game they played, on the famed parquet floor within New England's true Mecca for basketball. How cool was it, in fact, that the little-used Resnick was one of the five players representing Foxboro on the TD Garden court against North Reading as the final buzzer sounded?

But they worked so hard to get to the next game, and now it's a next game that will never come. They will always share a title with a team that did not prove itself worthy of it, and all because of something we cannot see or feel until it's too late to do anything about it.

I wanted to see that game. I really did. If not for the money that has disappeared into the ether over the past two weeks, maybe I would have rented space at Mass. Premier Courts, put up the Taconic girls at the Courtyard and told them and the Warriors to have at it in secret to settle the issue -- just like Rocky Balboa and Apollo Creed at the end of "Rocky III." No fans, no press, no matching uniforms -- just a spirited pickup game to determine who's truly the best. Ding, ding.

That would be the Hollywood ending -- although a darker one might resemble that of the 1960s apocalyptic film "On the Beach," in which the camera scans the empty streets of Melbourne as the radiation from the Northern Hemisphere's atomic war finally reaches Australia and wipes out the last outpost of humanity.

But, no. Like Wayne Campbell and his buddy Garth, I prefer the happier ending.

More likely, the real ending will involve a lot of sneezing and coughing and a long period of regret that the MIAA couldn't have found a way to play the games once we all got better. What you see below this column are the final cheat sheets I would have used for the Foxboro Cable Access telecast of Saturday's game at the DCU Center. I may never get to use them, but I won't delete them.

In the meantime, I'm truly happy to have been able to announce several of the Warriors' games this year and, as a result, to have become a small part of the memories they will cherish in the years to come, once the initial disappointment and heartbreak subside.

And it will. Trust me, it will.

The broadcast "cheat sheets" for a game that won't be played.

(Mark Farinella photo)