The silence, undoubtedly, will be strange.

Save for the occasional Tuesday night in May, which historically produces an inordinate amount of baseball, softball and boys and girls track events, Fridays in the fall are the busiest of the year for the TH sports department.

Those nights typically include around 15 boys and girls soccer games, a handful of girls volleyball matches and a full slate of high school football. And with lighted fields now the norm, nearly every local team is playing on Friday as opposed to Saturday afternoon.

Those circumstances have long created a controlled chaos that both enlivens and tests the sanity of our department. It’s a chaos that — for the first time in decades? — will, oddly, be absent come early September.

That was made so when the New York Public High School Athletic Association made the disappointing, but hardly unexpected, decision Thursday to delay the start of the fall sports season to Sept. 21 and cancel the state championships due to the ongoing global health crisis. It also left open the possibility of playing a condensed season for all sports beginning in January 2021.

THE ANNOUNCEMENT, of course, means that the next New York HS sporting event won’t take place until at least late September (meaning nearly six months will have passed between organized scholastic contests) and that those seasons will come to a definitive end in the sectional championship round. It also means, outside of any Pennsylvania events that might still be on as scheduled, our department will be silent on Sept. 4, on what was supposed to be opening night for NY grid teams.

But whatever tranquility comes as a result is far from being worth the sheer mayhem that might ensue come next spring or the sorrow our local schools and athletes continue to feel in the wake of these lost, shortened and uncertain seasons.

It’s a reality that has left athletic directors — and their kids and families — reeling.

“It’s just the not knowing,” Olean High AD Steve Anastasia said. “I like to have my schedules done, my bus schedules done, everything in order. And … all the changes. All the scheduling and everything we did is now out the window, which took months to do; now we’re going to have to do it all over again.”

WHO KNOWS, perhaps the fall season plays out as recently rescheduled, though Anastasia believes that’s unlikely. But if it doesn’t, the frazzled nature of athletics is only going to worsen.

Under the current condensed plan parameters, the new fall season would (tentatively) run from March 1-May 8 while the spring campaign would last from April 5-June 12. Let’s assume the start of college basketball season is also delayed and runs later into the spring.

Now envision an April with the following happening simultaneously: boys and girls soccer, girls volleyball, football, baseball and softball, track and field and Bona basketball … and that’s only locally.

It’s pure madness, for one. Seemingly logistically impossible, for another.

Dr. Robert Zayas, NYSPHSAA executive director, DID partially address the issue of overlap on Friday, tweeting: “Dates are tentative. Season 3 could end in late June & consideration for 8/9 week seasons, rather than 10 is a possibility; overlap would then be reduced. We will focus on what is best for kids.”

No matter how things play out, however, the current climate continues to be a source of frustration for ADs and their athletes, now facing the very real possibility of going consecutive seasons and a summer with no sports.

“I DON’T know; nobody knows,” said Anastasia, who noted that the CCAA is holding an AD meeting on Tuesday to discuss the news from this week. “Now we’ve got to do a Sept. 21 schedule in case this happens. And if that doesn’t happen, then we have to do a January condensed schedule …

“Between doing the whole spring schedule and not even playing that, now the fall, not playing that, now we’ll do Sept. 21 and probably not play that, then we’ll have to do a January one — it’s just, you’re kind of beating your head against the wall.”

In even a wholly imperfect world, our Big 30 athletes would be able to start practice on the Sept. 21, open play at the end of the month, play a schedule with limited travel and at least have an opportunity to compete for a sectional championship.

That’s something, especially when compared to what happened in the spring.

Given the direction things seem to be headed, though — college conferences canceling or postponing their fall seasons, cases rising and the status of school openings still very much in the air — Anastasia isn’t optimistic.

There’s also the challenge of adhering to any number of health and safety guidelines to consider.

“The way things are going … I don’t even see kids coming back to school,” he acknowledged. “I sit in meetings; facility meetings, transportation meetings — transportation itself is a nightmare, with busing and everything.

“For our football team, if we had to follow the guidelines, we would have to take five buses to a football game just for varsity, with social distancing and our equipment. It’s just ridiculous. I mean, ridiculous.”

Anastasia wants nothing more than for his athletes to be able to return to play. Four months later (and counting), that continues to be a fruitless venture.

“You’re doing all this work while in the back of your mind, you know it’s not going to happen,” he said. “You’re just doing it to do it. In that regard, it’s frustrating.”

(J.P. Butler, Bradford Publishing Company group sports editor, can be reached at jbutler@oleantimesherald.com)