MINNEAPOLIS — Emptiness.

It’s not an emotion often associated with this time of year. But if you walked by TCF Bank Stadium this weekend, you were greeted by locked gates and a dead metropolitan campus.

You can almost picture the single, forlorn leaf blowing down an otherwise-abandoned Monroe Street in Madison, Wisconsin on Saturday morning.

The Minnesota-Wisconsin rivalry had withstood the Spanish Flu and two World Wars. Since it began in 1890 — when railroads were the most popular form of transportation and the forward pass didn’t yet exist — the Battle for Paul Bunyan’s Axe has been canceled twice: In 1906, when President Theodore Roosevelt banned the then-barbaric practice of college rivalry games after a string of player injuries and deaths. And in 2020, when a new form of coronavirus called COVID-19 caused global upheaval.

So Camp Randall Stadium sits silent on a weekend that would’ve marked the 114th straight meeting between these Upper Midwest border nemeses. It remains the sport’s most-played matchup, with 129 all-time meetings (Wisconsin maintains the slightest of edges with a 61-60-8 mark).

It’s become a Thanksgiving Weekend tradition for Gophers fans — both the diehards and the folks who pay way more attention to the NFL, NBA, hockey, etc. save for the Wisconsin game — to bundle up and either invade Mad Town or make Dinkytown look like it’s hosting an outdoor music festival. It’s the epitome of the relationship between two universities, alumni bases and states that have a ton in common, from their friendliness to their geography to their economies, and yet at least pretend to despise each other for one weekend a year.

In Minnesota’s best season in over a century, it was the Badgers who kept it from becoming even more magical with a win here last year. Even as a College Football Playoff hopeful, Wisconsin spent the entire 2019 offseason walking past an empty trophy case in their facility where the Axe had resided during Bucky’s 14-year win streak, a record for the series.

It’s symbolic of what makes college football great. A celebration of an entire subregion’s collective culture as much as a sporting event.

Instead, Minnesota has at least 25 positive COVID-19 cases; it announced Wednesday 12 players and 13 staff members have been infected. That caused Saturday’s game at Wisconsin to be canceled, and the Gophers’ Dec. 5 tilt with Northwestern is in doubt.

You won’t often see graciousness from the Badgers toward their large-rodent counterparts, but coach Paul Chryst’s “get well soon” tweet this week highlighted how so much of what we’re going through this year is bigger than the athletic competitions we hold so dearly.

Perhaps Minnesota’s most talented player, meanwhile, has opted out of the season for a second time. Rashod Bateman’s decision to focus on the NFL Draft was received with positivity from most media and fans. The potential first-round pick had COVID earlier this year, and the virus continues to spike in Minnesota and around the country.

Here’s a question, though, and it’s just a question. If you’re a Gophers fan, do you feel any differently about Bateman’s words upon his reinstatement earlier this fall, now that he’s stepping away with potentially as few as 2 games remaining on the schedule?

Bateman aside, the entire situation wears on even ultra-effervescent coach P.J. Fleck.

“It challenges you,” Fleck said last week after his team’s 34-31 win over Purdue, which Minnesota played without about two dozen players (many with COVID, some with injuries). “It does everything it can to test your patience. It tests your commitment to the process. It tests your nerves. It tests your anxiety. It tests your culture. It tests everything you are as a coach and a man.”

It’s all a downer.

But there’s a lot of psychological research out there that suggests gratitude as a harbinger of good mental health. And even now, there is still a lot the Gophers can be thankful for:

  • They got to play football this year, period. Every game is, in some sense, a gift, especially after the B1G initially canceled the season.
  • They’ve got the right coach. Fleck’s schtick doesn’t work everywhere, but it’s darn near perfect as a differentiator for Minnesota.
  • The NCAA’s decision to award 2020 football participants an extra year of eligibility, and Fleck’s decision to rotate dozens of players while the roster battles COVID, means the Gophers will return a ton of game experience.
  • The program is recruiting at an abnormally high clip. Minnesota’s 2021 class ranks 25th nationally, according to 247Sports.

Yes, it’s all relatively insignificant against the weight of what we’re all dealing with right now.

But by definition, quarantines don’t last forever. And while the Axe will likely spend this season in lockdown — barring an unlikely rescheduling of this historic clash — this will eventually pass.

It’s something we’ll all get through together. Even on the final weekend of November, that’s something both Gophers and Badgers fans can agree upon.