We all have our own memories of when Covid first took over our lives.

For the editor of this newspaper, it was on the afternoon of Thursday, March 12, 2020.

All that day, he had been hearing about other VHSL basketball championship games being canceled, but the Class 1 championship between Mathews and Auburn was still going ahead as planned, so he was getting ready to make the drive to Richmond to the VCU Siegel Center to cover the Blue Devil boys in their fight for the state title.

As a precaution, he pulled up the emails on his phone one last time as he sat in his car in the Gazette-Journal parking lot, and there it was: a notice stating that the Class 1 championships, too, had been canceled. Concerns over a high school basketball game seem so insignificant now. They were soon dwarfed by much greater worries about a pandemic that would eventually claim the lives of nearly seven million people worldwide … and counting.

This past Saturday marks three years since COVID-19 w...