When the 2020 NCAA tournaments were canceled, it left a gaping void in the 2019–20 college basketball season. We’ll never know which men’s and women’s teams would have cut down the nets this April (though we can still guess!), which Cinderella teams would have emerged or which players would have forever etched their name in March Madness lore. Those blank pages will never be filled in, the 2020 postseason serving as nothing more than an asterisk when people, for years to come, try to look up this year’s champion and learn it was never played.
In a sense, this season’s March Madness is one big “what-if” scenario.