Another vote for when NBA suspended season. I remember talk of having the NCAA Tournament without fans and thinking how outrageous that was - and then everything stopped, and a tourney without fans suddenly seemed like a luxury. Then came the empty shelves, and going on expeditions for supplies, like we were living in the Walking Dead universe.
Our Governor announced a two week lockdown on, I think, March 18, 2o2o. I remember we all gathered at the pub and people were saying "see you in two weeks." Already, at that point, I knew that the only way to defeat a pandemic was through Test/Trace/Isolate/Repeat. I also fully realized that there was no chance of that approach every working in the U.S. So, as people were leaving, prior to the lock down deadline, I remember telling a friend "it's not going to be 'two weeks' - we'll be lucky if we're back by September." She bet me a beer that we'd be back at the pub at the beginning of April - I've yet to collect on that one.
When the first 'two week' lockdown was extended, my wife and I decided that, since this was never going to end, we were going to try to live normal lives. As she said "I've got to die of something." At that point we started to attend and host house parties with like-minded friends. On May 11, 2020, the Governor allowed restaurants to reopen - since my "pub" is also a restaurant, that meant the bar was open. So, in my little corner of the world, things really returned to normal after six weeks. The summer and winter, of 2020, were tense, as people weren't stupid - they could see an empty restaurant in front and a packed bar in back, know that maybe this wasn't exactly what the "spirit of the regulations" meant - but we survived. The Covid Police came twice, and didn't find anything, and, despite a lot of new permanent coughs, no one was hospitalized or died. Those six weeks were absolute torture for me, and my heart breaks, almost every day, as I read about the isolation many of you have maintained for over 18 months. I don't regret choosing to keep living in the moment. I hope you all have found the same peace in your choices.