That cloud hovering over openers is COVID

Starting Thursday, season ends when?

It should be a joyous occasion to reach the start of a new prep football season. A full prep football season. And it is, to a large extent. We all dearly missed high school football a year ago. And some schools didn’t play at all, in the fall or the spring, as they return to game action for the first time in 24 months.

On Thursday night, four metro-area schools will kick off the fall 2021 season. Highland will be at West Las Vegas (one of those schools that opted out of football entirely in 2020-21), Albuquerque Academy is visiting Tohatchi, and, at Milne Stadium, Sandia is facing Valley.

And with the arrival of these games, a certain weight is lifted. That spring season lasted 29 days from first kickoff to final whistle. And it just felt so weird, Friday Night Lights in March and April.

But we’re rejuvenated at the thought of watching an entire season unspool and the narratives that will emerge. Me? I’m looking forward mostly to the sounds and to that October nip in the air in a few weeks.

Thankfully, the football athletes won’t have to wear masks during games. This, we hope, will not change during the next three months.

Which leads to an observation that must be articulated — it would be foolhardy to bounce along as though there isn’t a dark cloud hovering over the arrival of Opening Night.

Ominously, COVID-19, this pesky wet blanket that we can’t seem to rid ourselves of, already has wrecked the plans for several local schools that hoped to open this week.

That list includes Rio Rancho and Atrisco Heritage, whose openers were erased not by their own doing but because of COVIDrelated complications with their opponents (Goddard and Del Norte, respectively).

The Knights, Belen and Moriarty were forced to cancel their openers in deference to COVID issues. In Del Norte’s case, as with Moriarty, it dealt with contact-tracing issues reducing the size of the roster to the point that going forward would be impractical. Belen has gone remote learning until Aug. 30, and thus the Eagles are losing their first two games, with a roadie at Farmington in Week 2 also off the table.

This much can be stated as fact without it actually yet having become a fact:

These are not the last games that are going to be canceled this season. My fear is it’s going to get worse. I’d love it if that hunch were proved wrong. Most of the signs out there are trending in a bad way right now. For instance, West Las Vegas is mandating that anyone attending the Dons’ home game Thursday night against Highland must be wearing a mask.

I’m not entirely sure that we’ll have a full season.

“It could come to that,” Eldorado coach Charlie Dotson said. “It’s unfortunate. I thought we were past this.”

Roswell High football coach Jeff Lynn tweeted this earlier in the week: “These Schools shutting down is only the tip of the iceberg. The schools who went back the 1st week of August are the ones closing. Wait til @

ABQschools & these other schools get a couple of weeks under there belts. It’s going to get ugly!!”

We must address this nagging thorn in our side, even though none of us particularly wants to.

What’s it going to take to reach that final Saturday in November, when the last football championship games are scheduled to be played?

The short answer is, nobody is sure if there even is an answer. This situation will be fluid from week to week.

“We can’t mandate the vaccine; that would be the only way,” Dotson said. “It’s a slippery slope.”

The way things stand, many athletes are likely (if inadvertently) going to be interacting with people — friends, family members, etc. — who contract COVID, especially the new Delta variant, our latest migraine.

And that means we almost certainly are going to see a rise in the number of positive cases among unvaccinated athletes, regardless of what fall sport they play.

And the inevitable rise in cases is going to trigger more cancellations and postponements, and more schools going to remote learning.

And that is a tipping point none of us want to reach, because then officials in Santa Fe are more likely to get more deeply involved in high school athletics, and New Mexico does not want to return to where we were in the spring of 2020, with sports being wiped out en masse.

“I’m really worried about it,” veteran Valley football coach Judge Chavez said. He already has faced and defeated COVID. “If we make it through the season, I’d be surprised.”

So is there anything that can ensure a full season?

“There’s not (anything),” Chavez said, adding, “If I had a penny for every time I had to say, ‘I don’t know,’ I’d be a millionaire by now.”