Sports may not be the be-all and end-all we came to count on.

Many of us have only recently grasped that, as sports content disappeared from our TV diets, shoved aside by a microscopic but deadly bug known as Covid-19, or the Coronavirus.

Players, teams and leagues toppled like dominoes over the span of a mind-numbing week. Playing games without fans in attendance looked like a solution for about three days, till some players were found to be infected by the virus and authorities began to grasp that big crowds were raw meat for the virus.

Boom! There went the NBA and NHL even as the playoffs loomed. Spring baseball disappeared. The Japan Olympics may not happen. College basketball’s March Madness has been shelved.

Name any major sports event, and it has been delayed, rescheduled or just plain cancelled, never to be played.

The usual fallback sports, on the college or high school level, were knocked flat, too. Re-runs of sports from some kinder year? May have to settle for that.

Perhaps the biggest shock was what happened to European soccer, which boasts the most closely watched teams in the world.

The Big Five European leagues turned out to be helpless against the virus, and the lights were turned off. Today it was revealed that the 2020 European Cup is pushed back to 2021. God-willing, of course.

Our elders would understand this better than we do.

Sports getting out of the way of disasters, plagues and war was something that was often seen, from the late 19th century right up to the mid-1940s.

World War II ended in 1945, and from that point forward we began to expect our sports to play as scheduled, and to be on our radio dial and then on our TV screen. Bad stuff happened in the world, from 1945 to 2020, but not big enough or bad enough to sideline our sports.

The virus has ended that arrogant sense of expectation. What is at stake in 2020, much to our annoyance (and then terror) is the health of millions of humans.

The Champions League, the Olympics, the World Series, et al … for the foreseeable future those take a back seat to the real struggle — for our lives.