Assuming the world hasn’t ended in a month, by the time Cherry and White Day would have been, the entire sports world is probably still stopped.

Temple has suspended classes and probably will have none by then. One of the first indicators of its impact on the sports world came a few days ago when the Ivy League jumped the gun and canceled its basketball tournaments, even though they could have played them in empty arenas. At the time, my initial reaction that it wasn’t fair to the Penn kids who had to fight their way to get to the No. 4 spot in the playoffs only to see the rug pulled out from under them. Then that became moot yesterday for Penn because the entire NCAA Tournament has been canceled, too.

If this makes certain we are all healthier in a month its all worth it as would be the decision by Temple to suspend its events.

The calendar will say Cherry and White Day occurred in 2019 and 2021 but list an open date in 2020. One hundred years from now kids will look at a Cherry and White program and ask their grandads what happened way back in 2020 and those guys will have to explain the coronavirus.

From the Temple football alumni page, and administrator Joe Greenwood

I should know. I covered the 1984 Central and Northeast football game as a 20-something youngster and noticed the game started in 1884 but had no result in 1918. After filing the story, I went home and asked my dad at Thanksgiving Day dinner about what happened in 1918 and he said basically half the city died with a flu epidemic that year and all kinds of things were canceled. He was exaggerating, but not by much.

Maybe the powers-that-be are exaggerating now. Maybe not. We’ll leave that to the medical experts.

I know because of last year I won’t miss Cherry and White as much as I used to because it’s gotten more watered-down with each and every year.

Cherry and White Day has changed a lot since the days even of Al Golden and Matt Rhule. In those days, like the ones before it, there was an actual game being played and you could identify guys who had a chance to do something in the fall.

As recently as the 2017 “game” Jadan Blue caught three touchdown passes and had over 100 yards in receptions so those of us who were there were not surprised by his 2019 breakout season (after sitting out 2018).

Not much could be garnered from the Rod Carey approach of running a controlled practice last year, but what is important now is getting this thing back ontrack in a few weeks.

Miami has also suspended its spring practices, but they got a full week in compared to one day for Temple.

Hopefully, that’s not the difference come Sept. 5. Nor is the fact that Quincy Roche is playing for the bad guys instead of the good ones.

Monday: Surprising Newcomers