The coronavirus, always in the lead, is beginning to put distance between its relentless self and the local and national sports sensibilities.

The highlight event of the Seattle sports calendar in September, the visit of the Michigan Wolverines and coach Jim Harbaugh to Husky Stadium for a season-opening game Sept. 5 against Washington, was cancelled Thursday.

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Since 1938, Seattle University's athletic mascot was the Chieftains. Until 2000, when the school's president, Rev. Stephen Sundborg, helped lead the change to Redhawks. To the scoffers who eye-rolled at the political correctness, Sundborg offered a simple retort.

"The whole purpose of a mascot is to unite people," he said at the time. "If it offends people, what's the purpose?"

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For what it's worth, the Mariners have been told they are booked to start their 60-game schedule of a most irregular season at 6:10 p.m. PT Friday, July 24 against the defending American League champion Astros in Houston, a city whose area hospitals nearly have reached capacity with the overload of coronavirus cases.

By July 24, maybe covid-19 will have disappeared by then, you know, like a miracle.

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Summer camp was as stilted as spring training was casual. Nobody wanted to catch viral cooties, but what's a batting cage for but to hang out, shoulder to shoulder? How can you tell if your clubhouse prank worked if you can't see a whole face full of anguish? And where's the party if there's no condo pool?

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Those darn college kids. Don't they know their near-constant desires to get drunk and laid are in the way of the entire purpose of universities, which is to stage college football?

Life is full of hard decisions, kids. You can't always get what you want, wrote Mick Jagger wrote a couple of generations ago. But if you try sometimes, you get what you need.

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The Mariners are open for the business of baseball training in Seattle Wednesday. Tuesday in Tacoma and Everett, baseball was closed for the season.

News of the fate of the the Mariners' Class AAA affiliate to the south and the Class A affiliate to the north was no surprise. It is hard is to play baseball without players.

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This month the NCAA is distributing about $225 million to member schools. Cool -- until it is realized that the expected payout was $600 million. The difference is due largely to the cancellation of the men's basketball tournament because of the coronavirus and all the clean protocol in the stadium, you can click here for read the new protocols.

Now you know why the University of Washington athletics department gave itself a 15 percent haircut Friday.

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A cause. Not a corporation.

The remade sports barn and concert hall at Seattle Center, home to a World's Fair, will be a billboard for a world crisis.

Climate Pledge Arena. Brought to you by Amazon.

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Puke and all, American sports fans will welcome back Major League Baseball.

Always have. Owners are betting fans always will be there -- even when they aren't permitted to attend in person. The belief has been supported by two bedrock truths:

Fans are suckers.

Owners are monopoly operators.

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Update: NASCAR said Tuesday afternoon that the FBI determined that driver Bubba Wallace was not the victim of a hate crime because it learned that a pull rope fashioned like a noose had been on a garage door at Talladega Superspeedway since as early as October. That was well before Wallace's team was randomly assigned stall No. 4 ahead of the Talladega 500 race over the weekend.

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The predictable sharp uptick this week in confirmed coronavirus cases in states that were earliest to re-open is scary for public-health officials as well as regular folks  partial to a little science and history. For those who propose to put on big-time team spectator sports in the fall, the news has the needle on the pucker meter nearly pinned.

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Now we know what new Huskies football coach Jimmy Lake thought about the quarterback crew he inherited from Chris Petersen:

Help!

Kevin Thomson, a lightly recruited QB in 2014 -- yes, 2014 -- from Auburn Riverside High School who became the Big Sky Conference offensive player of the year at Sacramento State, is transferring as a graduate and will be immediately eligible at Washington, his third school in seven years.

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In a time when no competitions were staged by America's most popular sports, a whole lot of sports is being watched -- through an entirely different prism.

Much of the industry is now inextricably intertwined with the racial politics of a polarized nation under an administration that seeks to keep it that way. The tension is as thick as it is unavoidable.

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We sentimentalize and romanticize baseball like no other American team sport.  Maybe that's why we keep giving it the freedom to break the collective sporting heart. We can't seem to quit on it.

But now might be the easiest time yet to slam the door off its hinges.

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Regarding the influence of the NFL in America's culture wars, Pete Carroll was as right as he was hyperbolic.

'The NFL is as powerful an institution as there is in the country," he said in an oral waterfall disguised as a Zoom conference Thursday with Seattle reporters. "This frickin’ league needs to stand up for the right stuff, and make things move where we can make things move.

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Road trip! Five to seven weeks in a Florida resort town, away from the fam, paid to hang with the guys!

After three months in quarantine, it sounds close to ideal.

Unless, of course, someone ends up seriously ill, or dead. But Major League Soccer and its defending champion Seattle Sounders are willing to risk it.

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New Seahawks RB Carlos Hyde Monday suggested that the NFL could demonstrate its new-found belief that black lives matter by ending the de facto exile of Colin Kaepernick. He elbowed the NFL hard in the ribs in 2016 to draw attention to police brutality and social injustice. Lo and behold in 2020, the league and America appear to get it now, although Kaepernick hasn't played since.

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As fears grew about covid-19, the sports world wondered what kind of long-term  changes a pandemic would bring to its operations, conduct and finances.

Then came the public murder of George Floyd, a handcuffed black man under the knee of a white cop who looked as casual as if he were writing a parking ticket. The racial outrage, as you may have read, is causing a global cultural earthquake.

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When Russell Wilson was asked this week about his response to Drew Brees's video interview remark that he "will never agree with someone who disrespects the flag," the Seahawks quarterback said he'd just come from a meeting and didn't get to "watch the whole thing."

Actually, there wasn't much else in the interview with Yahoo! Finance to see, other than to observe the venerable New Orleans Saints quarterback fall figuratively into the cultural abyss.

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In the unyielding avalanche over several days of video, news and opinion about the rage against police, economic collapse, a failing U.S. administration and a pandemic that seems certain to rally back -- while we strain absurdly to re-start major American sports -- a single remark spoke to the gravity of the moment.

As he stood on the Minneapolis street Wednesday where four policemen casually murdered George Floyd last week, Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, offered CNN something trenchant.

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