It’s about 3 p.m. on the day your team was supposed to face Clinton. What’s it like not preparing for that?

“You wouldn’t have been able to get into the parking lot. We’d be having our homecoming parade come down here, down this road north of the field. … I figure I’d be walking up to the press box, getting our scoreboards and things turned on, and it’s odd. It’s odd to see this field with no paint on it.”

Could the state be playing high school football right now?

“This is not to diminish the importance of the virus, but I do think we’re diminishing the importance of the positive impact that football and all high school athletics have on kids. … A lot of kids, that’s the most discipline they have in their life. It’s the greatest amount of structure they have.”

It kind of seems like the window for fall football has closed, though.

“There might be some people who are upset about this, but the fall, it’s come and gone. It’s Week 6, and with the acclimatization and things as far as that goes … that’s not going away. … The real question is, and I think everybody wants to know — what are the metrics? We keep saying we haven’t given up on it. We haven’t taken it away. It’s just moved to a different time. We’ve got basketball starting in a month. Nobody knows the metrics. And that’s really frustrating, because you don’t know what you’re working toward. The Big Ten came out with … the percentage of the team infection (hits this) and they’re going to shut it down. We don’t have a metric. We don’t even know what we’re striving toward so that we can play, and so that becomes the frustrating aspect of it.”

Has this lack of football given you a chance to consider the impact your team has on the community?

“We’re really lucky to get to do it in a town — and this is not lost on our kids — our kids are really lucky to get to do it here in a town that’s unbelievably supportive. I know our head girls’ basketball coach, Tim Kohlbecker, said to me one of the things he hears from the girls all the time is, he’s like, ‘Man, we really miss going to high school football games on Friday night.’ And it’s kind of part of the fabric of what we do around here, but that makes it a really special place, too. And I don’t think it’s lost on us that we get to do it in a place that’s this special. I think, though, it does make it feel like it’s that much more difficult that we can’t, and hopefully in the end there’s a level of appreciation that says, ‘Hey, we should never take this for granted and kids want to keep doing it.’”

Colin Likas is the preps coordinator at The News-Gazette. He can be reached at clikas@news-gazette.com, or on Twitter at @clikasNG.