Wasn’t it just six months ago when we all looked around and there were “no” sports? And no real notion of when any of them might come back?

Now it’s late September and we have all of the sports, all at once.

It’s been a strange journey to get to this point in 2020, with real big-boy college football ready to begin on Saturday as the SEC kicks off a unique 10-game schedule of conference- only games.

Let’s give a tip of the ballcap to SEC commissioner Greg Sankey, who didn’t panic when some other leagues did. He counseled patience in the face of the pandemic – and that seems to have been the right course.

This will wind up being history’s weirdest college football season, anyway, with games scattered from late August until perhaps May of next year.

The professional sports leagues, like that famous bank robber, decided to go where the money is – back to work.

Golf and NASCAR were the last two pro sports to fold their cards when the COVID-19 hit the fan, but they’ve both been very successful in finding their way back. A Masters in November will be weird, though.

The world’s biggest sport, soccer, didn’t pitch a fit – they found a way to fit their game back on the pitch as quickly as it appeared safe.

Hoops, there it is

Pro basketball, the first sport to pull the plug in the U.S., quickly adapted by using the “bubble” concept, which made it easier to manage and avoid outbreaks. The same for pro hockey, which shipped all of its business to Canada.

Pro football had the advantage of watching everyone else struggle to figure things out. COVID or not, though, bad NFL teams are still bad.

For a while, it seemed like major league baseball might be the one sport that couldn’t get out of its own way to get a season started – but it has, and playoffs are on the horizon.

High school fall sports were delayed a little bit in Mississippi, meanwhile, yet Friday night will be the fourth week of games for most MHSAA teams.

The Daily Journal somehow managed to print sports pages every day throughout the rise of COVID-19. Now, it’s about to get a lot busier for us.

Starting with Friday’s paper, we’ll begin publishing our GameDay college preview pages so that all subscribers can see them ahead of the weekend.

Some readers were concerned that our shift to an E-edition on Saturdays would make it hard to find our GameDay pages – including the TV listings. This will make it much easier for you, so don’t recycle that Friday paper until Sunday.

John L. Pitts (john.pitts@journalinc.com) is sports editor of the Daily Journal.