The days set aside for the state’s track and field championship meets, sometimes referred to as Memorial Day Weekend, came and went, passing with a few melancholy sighs over what might have been. Athletically, at least.

But its absence leaves empty spaces that can never be filled. What could have been? What surprises did these championships have in store that we will never, ever get to savor? What state records could have been broken?

A lost season of track and field is disappointing for more reasons than just state records that might have fallen.

Track and field is an intimate sport. Each and every athlete who competes in it ultimately faces just one opponent: themselves.

“The beauty of track and field is the measurables each season,” East Valley coach Shane Toy said in an email. “The stopwatch and tape never lie, and as a coach you can quantify each athlete’s improvements at the end of the season.”

Jesse Owens’ legendary four gold medals at the Berlin games in 1936 sum it up best.

Coaches will tell you they take as much joy from a personal-best mark from an athlete who never made it into a meet as they do from a school record.

“The battles that count aren’t the ones for gold medals,” he said. “The struggles within yourself – the invisible, inevitable battles inside all of us – that’s where it’s at.”

For a high school athlete, losing a season can be devastating. And for a high school senior, it is all the more crushing.

“As with all track coaches, our deepest concerns are with our seniors,” Toy said.

The EV senior girls who turned out for the Knights this spring took two paths to what was ultimately the canceled 2020 high school season. There were seniors who had been with the program four years.

In an athlete’s prep career, a senior season is often the time where three years of hard work pays its dividends.

Those athletes paid the admission fee but never got to see the show. For some, it spells the difference between earning a chance to pursue the sport in college on scholarship or not.

The other group of seniors Toy is concerned about were first-time track athletes – athletes who excelled at other sports and wanted to give track a whirl.

“I had a number of these seniors this year that were showing a lot of promise in their events,” Toy explained. “It’s the big question of what would have happened if they were able to compete this season?”

They are the pleasant surprise that never happens.

There could still be surprises from the lost spring of 2020. There are no meets, but motivated runners are still making their training runs, working out on their own and comparing notes with one another. They are still lifting weights and stretching and doing anything they can.

Mead’s Becky Cark did that, working out in a backyard high jump pit in the days before girls sports were treated with the respect afforded boys sports. By the time she got the chance to jump at a 1968 meet, she cleared 5 feet, 8 inches to win the meet and set a school record that still stands.

Orting’s Casey Corrigan taught himself to pole vault in his backyard. He set a state record by clearing 16-7 as a high school senior, but he’d already competed at the 1968 Olympic Games by that time.

Toy said the rest of his underclassmen, just like every team in the state, will simply have to start from scratch next year. A year older.

That’s just not an option for a high school senior.

“It’s a shame because I know that there were senior girls on my team that were going to shine this year to include making it to the state meet,” Toy said. “Even though they were not able to compete. They plan on walking onto the track teams at Eastern Washington and Spokane Falls.”