Weeks of speculation turned to reality Monday when the California Interscholastic Federation, the state’s governing body for high school athletics, announced that the fall sports season is being delayed until 2021 because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Assuming conditions improve over the next five months, the CIF’s revised calendar calls for regional or state football playoffs to be held April 17, with the last day of section playoffs to be held April 10.

Basketball will be woven into spring sports, with regional or state playoffs ending June 19.

According to the CIF news release, section start days will begin in December or January.

California joins New Mexico as the only states thus far to postpone high school sports until 2021 because of the virus that has infected nearly four million and caused 143,000 deaths in the United States.

The news Monday comes a little more than five weeks since the CIF announced that it would offer an alternative calendar by July 20 if it was determined that fall sports could not begin as scheduled.

“I don’t think anyone can predict accurately, as we’ve seen since mid-March, of where exactly this is going to go,” Nocetti told this news organization on June 12. “As things open up, I think we’re going to get a better indication, hopefully. We’re all looking for that piece of positive information each day to keep us going in the right direction.”

At the time of the CIF’s June update, coaches and athletes across the Bay Area held out hope that conditions would improve and administrators would decide that it was safe to play. Some schools were given the green light to start modified outdoor conditioning and others soon followed.

But as COVID-19 numbers in California dramatically spiked in recent weeks and many school districts elected to begin the fall academic term with distance learning, it became clear that the CIF would have to push pause on the upcoming season.

“I was pretty optimistic going into this thing that we were starting to turn the corner and people got back to workouts,” Saratoga football coach and athletic director Tim Lugo said this month. “But with the number of cases rising and people still demanding masks and social distancing, I just don’t know how we’re going to pull this off anytime soon. I hate to say that, but I just don’t know.”

The only questions: What would the CIF’s new calendar look like? And would the state’s 10 sections build their calendars around the updated state model or — and this seems unlikely — go their own way?

The North Coast Section, the local governing body for schools stretching from the East Bay to the coastal side of the Oregon border, plans to announce its calendar later Monday. The Central Coast Section, which has a jurisdiction that extends from King City to San Francisco, is expected to unveil its plans Tuesday after an executive board meeting.

The fall postponement is not unprecedented. During the Spanish Flu pandemic a century ago, the CIF’s Southern Section held its football championship in March of 1919.

With Monday’s announcement, COVID-19 has now officially affected all three seasons of high school sports in California.

On March 12, a day after the NBA suspended operations, the CIF canceled its state basketball championships scheduled for that weekend in Sacramento.

On April 3, the CIF pulled the plug on spring sports, which had been on pause since mid-March.

Now, the hammer has dropped on the most popular sport — football — a decision that had one high-profile coach thinking in nostalgic terms on the eve of the news.

“This is looking like the first fall I’ve had without football since 1993,” De La Salle football coach Justin Alumbaugh wrote in a text Sunday night.

Twenty-seven years ago, Alumbaugh was in eighth grade.

Check back for updates.