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The 2021 college season will be unlike any before it, with more talent across the country than at any other time in the history of the sport.

- TEDDY CAHILL

To tell the story of the 2021 college baseball season—a season that will be unlike any other in the sport’s history, one that will come with coronavirus testing and protocols designed to limit its spread, but also more talent than ever before—we have to start at the end of the 2020 season.

Last season was the first in decades to not end with a dogpile and fireworks in Omaha. Instead, it was aborted a month after Opening Day, just as the coronavirus began spreading in America. That incompleteness reverberates through the sport today and will for years to come. To explain this year, we must first understand what happened last year.

The season began like any other with the fanfare of Opening Day on Feb. 14—Valentine’s Day. Just four weeks later, it was over.

On the morning of March 12, the college sports world was just beginning to feel the seismic effects of the nascent pandemic. Within 24 hours, it had seen the Ivy League become the first conference to cancel athletics and the NBA go on pause following the positive test by Utah Jazz center Rudy Gobert. Still, no one expected what the day would bring.

Conference after conference followed the Ivy League and NBA’s lead, placing their own seasons on pause. Then, at 4:14 p.m., the NCAA released a statement that it was canceling all its winter and spring championships—including the College World Series—due to the spread of the coronavirus. The season was over.