When Yoshiro Mori, president of the Tokyo Olympics organizing committee, claimed defiantly in February that the greatest show on Earth would go ahead in spite of a looming pandemic, few realized what wishful thinking that was.
Weeks later, with the coronavirus engulfing the planet, the mighty Olympic juggernaut was stopped in its tracks and the sporting calendar disintegrated.
In many ways the announcement on March 24 that the Games were postponed until 2021 came as a relief for the thousands of athletes left in limbo as Tokyo organizers and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) held out for a medical miracle.
It was the first time a modern Olympic Games had been delayed in its 124-year history.
The delay of the two-week sporting jamboree, albeit one originally costing $12.6 billion, pales into insignificance compared with the toll of COVID-19 on lives and livelihoods.
The year is ending with vaccines offering hope of containing the virus, but more than 1.5 million people have died from the virus and economies around the world are in turmoil.
A bunch of sports men and women forced to put their gold-medal dreams on hold appears trivial by comparison, yet the crisis has emphasized sports' benefit to society and not just because of its estimated $756 billion annual value.
The Olympic Games, for all its faults, doping scandals and mind-boggling budgets remain, on the whole, a showcase for the human spirit, inspiring the world's youth.
By the time the Olympics succumbed to the inevitable delay an eagerly awaited sporting year was already unravelling.
Domino effect
A week before the Games were postponed, the Euro 2020 football tournament, second only to the World Cup in size, was rescheduled until 2021 as UEFA accepted the futility of staging an event across 12 cities during a pandemic.
"The thought of celebrating a pan-European festival of football in empty stadia, with deserted fan zones, while the continent sits at home in isolation, is a joyless one," said Aleksander Ceferin, head of the sport's European governing body.
Every major domestic football league ground to a halt while iconic events fell like dominoes.
For the first time since World War II there was no Wimbledon tennis championships. The revamped Fed Cup and Davis Cup finals both bit the dust as did city marathons from London to Boston.
Golf's Ryder Cup and British Open were canceled, while the Masters was shunted to a spectator-less Augusta in Autumn, long after the azaleas had bloomed.
The Formula One season stalled on the grid in Australia where cricket's T20 World Cup was postponed until 2021.
The NBA and NHL seasons were both suspended for more than four months, while MLB clubs canceled more than 1,500 games, resulting in the shortest regular season on record.
The list of disruptions was endless and the financial implications enormous.
Sporting memories
Yet out of the chaos, federations, event organizers and athletes displayed ingenuity and resolve to still provide incredible sporting memories in the darkest of years.
Spanish tennis player Rafael Nadal produced an extraordinary display to thrash Novak Djokovic and win a jaw-dropping 13th French Open title after a gloomy and cold fortnight in Paris at a delayed tournament in October.
It drew Nadal level with Roger Federer on 20 Grand Slams.
That a delayed Tour de France reached Paris without a major COVID-19 outbreak was a triumph in itself. Yet it provided one of the most astonishing finishes ever as Slovenian Primoz Roglic saw the yellow jersey slip from his grasp a couple of kilometers from glory with compatriot Tadej Pogacar winning an epic race.
Europe's football leagues resumed behind closed doors with Liverpool claiming its first Premier League title for 30 years, while Turkish Süper Lig had a new champion among the ranks after Başakşehir became the sixth-ever titleholder of the league.
The business end of the Champions League from the quarterfinal stage was condensed into 11 days in Portugal with Bayern Munich beating Paris Saint-Germain in the showpiece match.
England won the longest Six Nations rugby championship ever staged – nine months after an opening-day defeat by France.
The Super Bowl, played in front of 62,000 fans just over a month before a pandemic was declared, witnessed a fairytale finish as the Kansas City Chiefs clawed back a 10-point deficit heading into the fourth quarter to beat the San Francisco 49ers and claim their first title for 50 years.
The LA Lakers captured a record-equaling 17th NBA Championship by beating Miami Heat after the season resumed in July in a fan-less Disney World biosecure bubble while the Dodgers snapped a 32-year title drought in the MLB.
The year was book-ended by the death of two sporting icons – NBA great Kobe Bryant who was killed in a helicopter crash in January, and Argentina football maestro Diego Maradona who passed away aged 60 in November.
After so much heartache there is hope that 2021 will restore a semblance of normality and that, in the words of the IOC and Tokyo organizers on that somber day in March, the Olympic flame will become a light at the end of the tunnel.