The NCAA announced on March 12 that it was canceling all championships, including the 2020 men's and women's basketball tournaments, because of the coronavirus outbreak. Since then, there have been questions and speculation around what led to the decision. ESPN contacted commissioners, coaches, players and officials to get their takes on an unprecedented few days in college sports.

Reporting below from ESPN's Andrea Adelson, Jeff Borzello, Heather Dinich, Graham Hays, Paula Lavigne, Ryan McGee, Mark Schlabach and Mechelle Voepel.

IT WAS CLOSING in on the noon tipoff Thursday at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, and UMass and Virginia Commonwealth were about to kick off the Atlantic 10 men's basketball tournament.

Just 6 miles away at the Marriott Marquis in New York City, A-10 commissioner Bernadette McGlade stepped out of the men's basketball selection committee meeting to call league officials at her conference tournament to assess the situation.

"It felt like a movie," McGlade said. "You're watching a thriller, someone's trying to deactivate the bomb and time is ticking down -- how much time is on the clock? Make the decision right now, otherwise they're tipping and then you've got another set of issues."

McGlade asked one official, "How much time is left on the clock?"

"Eight minutes!"

They ran through a few scenarios before McGlade asked again, "How much time is left on the clock?"

"4:10!"

By this time, the SEC and Big Ten had decided to cancel their tournaments, setting off a chain reaction that eventually reached every league. McGlade had permission from her university presidents to do the same.

"Stop play," McGlade said.

Across the country, university presidents, conference commissioners, athletic directors and health experts were holding conference calls from hotel rooms, stadium tunnels and, yes, even a restroom, scrambling to answer one question just hours after the World Health Organization characterized the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic and the NBA suspended its season: How can we keep playing?

Conference by conference, reality started to set in. The SEC was the first major conference to cancel its conference basketball tournaments. The American, Big Ten, Atlantic 10, WAC, C-USA, MAC, CAA, ACC and Pac-12 all followed suit within a half hour.

In Katy, Texas, the public address announcer at the Southland women's tournament delivered the news as coaches from New Orleans and Southeastern Louisiana huddled with referees and game officials. They had no time to get to their players first. Players collapsed on the court, weeping.

AP Photo/Ben McKeown

"It's indescribable the way I felt when I looked in my team's eyes," New Orleans coach Keeshawn Davenport said. "By the time I got to my phone in the locker room, I had 55 text messages because so many people were watching it online and they were, unbeknownst to us, recording all that, so they saw my seniors on the ground. I got so many text messages saying, 'My heart is broken,' so many crying emojis."

And as the college basketball world came to a halt everywhere else, Creighton and St. John's tipped off the Big East tournament with a handful of people watching at Madison Square Garden, the only scheduled noon game that went off on time -- a bizarre scene that perfectly illustrated the sheer uncertainty over what to do and when to act.

One week ago today, no one expected conference tournaments, let alone all college sports through the spring, to be wiped away. Though COVID-19 had reached the United States, only a few games had been impacted. But sports was not immune to the unprecedented scenario facing millions of people across the globe.

For the first time since it began in 1939, the NCAA men's tournament will not be played; neither will the women's tournament, both College World Series, both Frozen Fours or national championship tournaments in other sports, such as swimming and diving, golf, track and field and tennis.

"If you had told me we'd have a year without March Madness, without the College World Series in Omaha or Oklahoma City, I would have laughed," NCAA president Mark Emmert told ESPN. "College sports is such an integral and iconic part of American society, it's just really gut-wrenching to imagine it stopping, even for a short period of time."

play 5:04 Relive the top moments from the NCAA basketball season Check out some of the best moments from men's and women's college basketball this season, including Sabrina Ionescu's historic game in memory of Kobe and Gianna Bryant on Feb. 24.

'Lol. What a joke.'

March 10, 11:37 a.m. ET: Ivy League announces it will cancel the men's and women's conference basketball tournaments, awarding its automatic NCAA tournament bids to the regular-season champions.

At first, many within the basketball community laughed at the Ivy League.

"The Ivy League canceled their tournament? Lol. That's so Ivy League," one coach texted ESPN immediately after the decision.

"Lol. What a joke," another coach's text read.

When the Ivy League announced it was canceling its conference tournaments, it didn't seem like a harbinger. It instead raised eyebrows around college basketball. Coaches from other conferences questioned why it couldn't have the tournament without fans or why it couldn't move the tournament (host Harvard announced it was closing and students had to leave campus by the end of the weekend).

Harvard guard Bryce Aiken tweeted it was a "horrible, horrible, horrible decision," while Penn head coach Steve Donahue called it "the most horrific thing I've dealt with as a coach." A petition was started to get the tournament back.

It turned out to be a prescient decision.

Early Wednesday morning, Dr. Brian Hainline, the NCAA's chief medical officer, presented the recommendation of the organization's COVID-19 advisory panel to the internal leadership team: Play the tournaments with no fans. It soon led to an emergency meeting of the board of governors.

"Not only was it a unanimous decision, but it was, 'Let's get this decision out this afternoon because we really need to make a statement, and it's a statement about public health,'" he said.

Throughout the rest of Wednesday, however, the situation became more dire, as information continued to come out about the projected impact of the coronavirus.

play 0:16 Hoiberg appears ill on the sideline Nebraska head coach Fred Hoiberg, who felt sick before the game, appears to be suffering from an illness while on the sideline.

"It really became clear that if the United States didn't go into a very aggressive behavioral risk mitigation, and possibly even containment strategy, there could very easily be a minimum of 500,000 deaths," Hainline said. "[When I presented the advisory panel's results] to the senior management team, their jaws dropped wide open, kind of like, 'Are you kidding me?' ... I just showed the data, showed the charts, showed the mathematical modeling and the projections. They just sort of nodded. No one pushed back, but jaws did hit the floor."

The NCAA faced another dilemma when colleges started to cancel classes and more conferences canceled their tournaments. NCAA leaders debated a shortened format in a "sterile" environment, but aside from the logistical challenges and the issue of fairness, Hainline said, "You can't assume anyone is negative."

As Wednesday evening approached, the NCAA faced a more limited number of alternatives.

"We saw a number of decisions being made or being considered at the state level around what we could and couldn't do to host events in terms of the size of gatherings," Emmert said. "It started to become clear that we may not be able to use all of the sites we'd intended, and we might have to have some alternatives."

The greater Seattle area, Ohio and parts of New York were locking down because of the outbreak. "We [were] completely convinced at 4 p.m. on Wednesday that we could conduct the championships without fans by controlling the sites effectively," Emmert said. "We thought we could control the perimeters and control the environment, and, as best as possible, travel because it's mostly charter travel and buses one way or another. We felt really confident about it. We were feeling really, really good."

Wednesday, March 11: The night that changed everything

play 1:38 Winston reacts to NCAA tournament cancellation: 'I went out a champion' Michigan State guard Cassius Winston reacts to the NCAA tournament being canceled, ending his career with the Spartans.

Fred Hoiberg mentioned to his wife and daughter at dinner on Tuesday night that it was the first season he's gone through without being sick. The long winter months, the stress of the postseason -- it usually takes its toll on Hoiberg down the stretch, but he made it through the 2019-20 campaign without much hindrance.

Twenty-four hours later, a three-second video clip of the Nebraska men's basketball head coach was one of two events that sent the sports world into panic on Wednesday night.

Hoiberg woke up Wednesday morning with symptoms of a mild cold and decided to visit the on-site doctor at the Big Ten tournament. The doctor ran tests on Hoiberg's lungs and checked his vitals and said he was fine.

"The decision was made there I was clear to coach," Hoiberg said. "If he had any shred of doubt that I was putting people in danger, I would've never gone out there on the sidelines."

Midway through the Cornhuskers' game against Indiana that night, cameras showed Hoiberg's face in his arms as he appeared ill. The same clip showed assistant coach Armon Gates rubbing his hands with Purell. With three minutes left, Hoiberg went to the locker room and was then taken to the hospital.

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Nebraska's team remained in the locker room for more than an hour after the game ended as uncertainty over its coach's diagnosis remained before Hoiberg was released from the hospital a couple of hours later and diagnosed with influenza-A.

College coaches wondered if it was the last straw for the NCAA tournaments. What had happened that night in the NBA pretty much removed any remaining doubts.

Utah Jazz star Rudy Gobert tested positive for the coronavirus, leading to the last-minute cancellation of his team's game against the Oklahoma City Thunder and the suspension of the NBA season.

"The theory became the reality at that point," North Carolina athletic director Bubba Cunningham said. "Now all of a sudden, it was an athlete, it was Tom Hanks, it became personalized. We started looking at, 'What's the science telling us?' The scientists have been telling us this for a while, but it didn't strike us until the reality of an individual we could identify with became the person that was the carrier."

"In my mind, when Rudy Gobert tested positive, that changed the entire dynamic for all of sports," Syracuse athletic director John Wildhack said.

Gobert's positive test "reinforced where we were going, but we were going there anyway," Hainline said. "It already was a given that there was absolutely no way March Madness could exist. ... Wednesday night, we came to that realization."

Other NCAA officials believed the same, even if tournament games went on that night.

"That was really, in my opinion, a seminal moment in everybody's mindset about how impractical and possibly not responsible it would be at that point to go forward with trying to hold these national championships," said Dan Gavitt, the NCAA's vice president of men's college basketball.

Added Emmert: "It was like an exclamation point. It was like, 'Yeah, this is real.'"

What could have been