The indoor track season came to an end this weekend amidst a collegiate community, country and world that is powerless at the hands of their own fears and anxieties about the novel coronavirus. Things could have easily halted.

But, at the end of the day, sports are a form of entertainment, even at the college level, and the show must go on.

For the Fordham Rams, the season came to an end in Boston, Mass. at the Track & Tennis Center of Boston University for the ECAC/IC4A Championships. Over the two days of events, the squads, both men and women, competed and won to end the season in style. 

With events first getting started on Saturday, the Rams competed in nine events in the afternoon and found themselves moving onto the next day’s finals in four of them.

Highlighting the Saturday for Fordham by scoring, placing and qualifying were the usual suspects that highlight the pages: Junior Nikolas Reardon tied for eighth in the long jump at a height of 6’4 3/4″, graduate student Nicholas Raefski ran a season-best mark of 14:02.41 in the 5,000-meter event and junior Kathryn Kelly qualified for Sunday’s 200-meter dash event by coming in fourth at the Saturday preliminary running at a time of 24.29 seconds.

Additionally, Kelly competed in the day’s 60-meter dash preliminaries, running a time of 7.78 seconds, good for 17th place.

Junior Arthur Gooden Jr. also had a standout day, not only qualifying in the 500-meter dash with a seventh place time of 1:04.00, but also joining the ranks of juniors Antony Misko and Kyle Mack and freshman Erik Brown to run in the 4×400 relay. They qualified in eighth for the following day, posting a time of 3:15.03, their best of the year.

There was one more qualifying entity for the Rams on Saturday: the quartet of sophomores Jeremiah LaDuca and Zalen Nelson and juniors Will Whelan and Christopher Strzelinski. They ran the 4×800 relay and finished in 7:32.90, another season-best time and good for third place in the race.

At the finals on Saturday,Fordham continued to perform and finished the indoor campaign with an exclamation point.

Kelly was the highlight of the day, as her fourth place finish in the 200-meter final was a time of 24.22 seconds, breaking her own school record of 24.23.

The relay quartets also scored: the 4×400 squad of Gooden, Misko, Mack and Brown finished at 3:16.29 for a sixth place mark. Their counterparts in the 4×800 — LaDuca, Nelson, Whelan and Strzelinski — had a third place bronze finish, with another season-best time at 7:31.47.

The final event was the 3,000-meter run finals: the women’s race saw Fordham’s freshman Alexandra Thomas come in 14th place at a season-best mark of 9:48.77, and sophomore Brandon Hall had a time of 8:19.09 in the men’s event, coming in 10th place.

Winter can seem quite long, or it can feel like it goes by really quickly. For Fordham Track & Field, one can only imagine the latter is the case. The indoor season is over.

Next up is the spring season: track’s prime time. Things will get going in about a week and a half, with a season opener at Stony Brook University.

Fordham will have time to rest before they move back outside, and the spring’s bright sun provides a natural spotlight for the Rams.