A dream denied

The Big Sky Conference Pitcher of the Year hangs out in Great Falls these days. Her mom was able to find some toilet paper on a recent run to the grocery store, which was a win. The house was in short supply. Critically short supply.

The month of April approaches. It's the first time since she was seven that her spring won't be centered around softball. At least the actual playing of it. In Tristin Achenbach's mind, the season goes on and plays out if she allows her thoughts to go there.

It can be a pleasant diversion from the news that can feel overwhelming, from new routines that remind her of what was lost. Then she snaps out of it and returns to the grief she can't put behind her. Not yet anyway. And probably not for a long, long time.

Magical seasons and special teams don't come around every year.

A listing of recent stories details the heights that were reached and the lows that have been hit in what feels like a few blinks of the eye. It reveals how quickly and how drastically things have changed.

Griz knock off ranked Razorbacks ... Montana knocks off another Power 5 opponent ... Achenbach named Big Sky Pitcher of the Week once again ... Big Sky Conference suspends spring sports ... Big Sky Conference cancels spring competitions and championships.

It hasn't been a linear progression through the five stages of grief. She's hit denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance, each in its own time and not necessarily in that order. None has been checked off and set aside.

"Some days it feels like I've accepted it, then some days I feel like I'm back at the beginning at denial and don't think it's real," she says. "It depends on the day, but I'm always grieving, just in different ways every day."

It felt like a knee-jerk reaction when the NCAA announced the cancelation of all spring championships -- was that really less than two weeks ago? -- just hours after putting an end to its popular basketball tournaments.

Really? Couldn't we exercise some patience and see how things play out for a week or two before going full-on apocalyptic? Today it feels like the move was not only prudent but prescient as entire states and millions of people go into lockdown, ordered to stay away from one another.

And to think: one of our very first concerns was the loss of games.

"Selfishly it's been hard to see the 2020 season come to an end, but life is more important than softball," says Griz coach Melanie Meuchel, which is a revealing sentiment. The coach's life has for years and years revolved around the sport. Until one day it didn't.

"If the hardest thing for our team to go through right now is our season being cut short, then we're in a very good spot. The reality of the illness some people are facing, of people losing their jobs, is much bigger.

"Our everyday lives are just a small factor in the world. Our struggles are much smaller than other struggles going on."

Montana would have been bussing to Pocatello for its opening Big Sky Conference series of the season this week at Idaho State, not long after returning from a trip farther down the same interstate to face Utah Valley, BYU and North Dakota State. It was about to get serious.

Then: home series later in the spring against Sacramento State, which ended the season with a league-best 14 wins, and Big Sky preseason favorite Weber State. It was a dream lineup. All eyes looked ahead to sunny afternoons at Grizzly Softball Field.

Achenbach mentions none of these. What she and her teammates lost just goes deeper than what we did.

She is a fierce competitor, which she hides well behind her soft-spoken, easy-going demeanor, but it's not the games themselves she will miss most. It's what they represented, which was the chance to join her teammates in working toward a common goal.

They love the support they get from their fans, they really do, but it's the feeling they have with one another, in the dugout, that's the most special part of it all. Not every team has it. Only the luckiest discover it, then cherish it, hoping it never leaves. But it's always specific to time and place.

The sound of ball slapping against leather as players warmed up before another practice at Grizzly Softball Field, so much laughter that you wonder if a team could really have this much fun together? The signaling of an ongoing camaraderie, a call to action to continue a team's pursuit toward a shared goal.

Together on an almost daily basis since early January, she and her teammates are now connected electronically only, which is no way to live. But it will have to do.

"We have a big group message and we communicate quite a bit. We still have each other's backs and are supporting each other through this, even though it's not softball things," she says. "We're supporting each other through life and whatever comes at us."

A handful of experts saw this coming back in January. Not the end of a softball season but the potential worldwide spread of a virus that had resulted in just a few hundred cases in a faraway place when the Grizzlies convened in early January for their first preparations for the season ahead.

The crazy part of the story -- if the idea of the NCAA canceling its basketball tournaments isn't quite wild enough -- is that the coronavirus did not even exist, at least in current form, when Montana was wrapping up its fall exhibition schedule in October.

It wouldn't surface until November in a Chinese seafood and poultry market. Montana held its first practice on Monday, Jan. 13, two days after the first known death from an illness caused by the virus was reported. The two starts hardly seemed to be connected.

The first death that was attributed to the virus in the U.S. came on Feb. 28. The next day, the Grizzlies scored six runs in the bottom of the sixth to defeat Michigan State 6-0 in California.

In the 10 days between Montana's return from Grand Canyon's tournament and the Grizzlies' scheduled trip to play at Utah Valley on March 18, things changed by the hour, both for athletes and for people in general, as a national emergency was declared.

"I don't even remember how many ESPN notifications I had in those 36 hours," said Achenbach of the time between Wednesday night, March 11, when the NBA suspended its season, and Thursday, March 12, when the NCAA canceled all of its spring championships.

Meuchel is surrounded on a daily basis -- was surrounded on a daily basis -- by young women between the ages of 18 and 22, but she still likes an old-school approach to communication.

To her, it doesn't get any more personal or perfect than to be in a huddle with her staff and players, without any electronics getting in the way, just eye contact and person-to-person communication.

The events, coming so fast and furious and so impactful to her players and her program, had her at a loss to keep up. Even text messages were no match for notifications and social media run amok.

She wanted to lead her players through the most disruptive period of most of their lives. And she couldn't. She couldn't keep them in a protective huddle forever.

"I wasn't able to be at the forefront of it, but that's the world we're living in, which makes it hard with people you care so deeply about," she says.

"That's one of our foundations, of being able to talk to people face-to-face when you have important or tough information to share, to be able to do that as a group."

The team gathered at 3 p.m. on Friday, March 13. The evening before the Big Sky Conference had announced a suspension of all spring sports. Not long before the meeting, the President of the U.S. announced the country was officially in a state of emergency.

"You knew it was going to be much bigger than softball at that point. In our meeting, we talked about how substantial this was for our country and for the world," Meuchel says.

"We did our best to wrap our minds around it. It was going to be life-changing for a lot of people, their schedules, their routines, their normal. Everyone was going to be asked to do something much different than what we know."

But there was hope in that one word: suspension. The season had yet to be canceled. The Big Sky had announced a suspension until April 15, at which time things would be reevaluated.

It wasn't much, but it was something.

"All of us were hanging on to that sliver of hope that we might get to play at least the Big Sky tournament or something," says Achenbach.

"Then even that got taken away. I guess I would have preferred to be hopeful for a little bit than just having our season canceled right away. It was kind of gradual, but it still wasn't fun."

Hope wouldn't last until April 15. The Big Sky canceled all spring competitions and championships last Wednesday, March 18. Things had grown that dire that quickly. That things might show improvement by April 15 seemed absurd, and everyone knew it, even if they didn't want to admit it.

The games? The practices? The pursuit of a championship, the realization of a shared dream? All done.

Meuchel found out in an email from her athletic director just 15 minutes before the news was distributed by the league office. Once again she was unable to get in front of it.

"The last thing I wanted was for them to learn about the end of the season through social media or even a text from me," she says. If she couldn't have her huddle, she at least would have liked to have had a chance to break the news over the phone.

The news broke and she had to play catch-up.

"We started making phone calls and spent as much time with each individual as we needed to. For some it could be the end of their careers. For others it was the start of their careers, but for all of us it was the end of a season that felt like we were doing some very good things," she says.

Most of the players had headed home for spring break, when it was just a suspended season, all of them hopeful they would return to campus and practice through the suspension, then play again by mid-April.

Instead, their season was canceled right in the heart of the week of spring break. With the University of Montana going to online classes for the rest of the semester, home is where most of them remain.

It's why the Big Sky Conference Pitcher of the Year is in Great Falls, celebrating the more prosaic victories, like finding a store that has toilet paper in stock.

Of course Achenbach isn't officially the Big Sky Pitcher of the Year -- who knows what the league will decide to do with the usual postseason awards -- but she has as good a claim as anyone.

A league-best nine wins. A league-best 76 strikeouts. A 2.57 ERA.

It's what all the Grizzlies are doing these days, asking what if and what could have been. They are not alone, not in their department or in their league. It's a smaller, more minor, crisis than the one faced by a nation, but one that hits even closer to home for most of them.

One is mostly abstract. One is felt on a daily basis.

The coronavirus remains a threat and hopefully remains just that, something that could strike but never does. The softball season? That had already taken hold of their hearts. They were all carriers and it had the chance to be beautiful.

No longer.

"That definitely makes it harder," says Achenbach. "We had so much hope for conference and what was to come. We were catching our stride as a team and playing well.

"It feels like unfinished business. Who knows what would have happened? But at least it would have been under our control. Winning the Big Sky would have been up to us."

And that's what has been lost, isn't it? Control. Control over doing what we want, where we want, when we want. We want to take back control of our lives.

That this all comes with no structured timeline makes it even worse. Are we in the later innings, or is this still the bottom of the first? Only time will tell.

Ah, time. When they are good, we want them to slow down and last forever. When they are at their worst, they're a millstone and all we can do is look for and wait for better ones to arrive.

When a softball season comes to an end in May, it brings with it the usual emotions. For starters: depression that everything that has been worked for is over. And that it will never be quite the same ever again.

Then acceptance arrives and summer comes and it won't be long until school and fall workouts resume. Now? Fall feels like forever from today. And who knows what that will even bring.

Somehow it's still late March and time drags on. Days seem to last longer -- much longer -- than just 24 hours. It's a by-product of losing control, of giving up the things you love to do.

The calendar shows the weeks ahead, all future Montana softball games, once highlighted, now X-ed out in red.

No one could have prepared for this. But Achenbach still has it. Her passion for the game. Her love of team. It's what she continues to hold on to. She has to.

With everything right now being filed under UNKNOWN, she looks forward to what she hopes is ahead, and that it arrives sooner rather than later.

"I still haven't come to terms with the idea that my junior season is over," she says. "But I'm still excited for the next time I get to step on the field. I haven't lost that motivation. I wished I was playing right now."

Instead she sits and waits. Like the rest of us. "It's crazy to me that it's March and we've already turned in our equipment. We don't do that until May. It's just a crazy time."

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