LSU football had Louisiana on top of the world in January. Then the rest of 2020 happened.

Then came the rest of 2020. Then came the unusual novel coronavirus pandemic and the usual irate climate. Then came an early outbreak of covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus that has seen Louisiana amass the most cases per capita among states to date, and the various storms that have destroyed homes, wrecked electric grids and heightened water to close roads and turn brackish water further to salt and farms further to marshland. And as LSU prepares to open a new season against retooled Mississippi State on Saturday in Baton Rouge with its Tiger Stadium audience limited to 25 percent of capacity, the year has brought a spate of reminders that Louisiana always seems to experience its joy, pain and resiliency in outsize degrees.

“We are up against a lot,” Nic Hunter said from Lake Charles.

“I think the depression in a city like New Orleans is more keenly felt,” Kodi A. Roberts said from the city that has consumed his still-young life.

“It’s been a crazy, crazy ride,” Anthony Goldsmith said from down the bayou south of New Orleans in Galliano.

“My personal reaction is just a sense of anxiety and doom,” John Bardes said from Baton Rouge.

“We started off high, and after that we’ve had to constantly remind ourselves that it’s going to get better,” Catherine O’Neal said from Baton Rouge.

Hunter is the mayor of Lake Charles, the southwest Louisiana city writhing from the ravages of Hurricane Laura, which tied a 164-year-old record as the strongest storm to reach Louisiana land. Roberts resides in New Orleans, where four of his next-door neighbors contracted covid-19 and one died, and he teaches history at LSU, where his students know storm damage in their bones and two or three of them have gone to Lake Charles on National Guard duty.

Goldsmith owns Kajun Twist, a restaurant in the oil and gas economy south of New Orleans, where his to-go window has been a godsend and where he takes a plate of lunch each day to famed Cajun chef Alzina Toups, his 93-year-old great-grandmother. Bardes is a freshly minted assistant professor of history at LSU who grew up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan but felt helpless against the vivid, moving pull of Louisiana on Day 1 in 2006, when he arrived to help gut houses after Hurricane Katrina. O’Neal is an LSU infectious-disease specialist who serves on the SEC’s medical advisory panel.

Their interests in football vary from much to scant, but they all felt the air around Jan. 13.

“They literally shut down campus,” Roberts said of Jan. 13 and 14 at LSU, the alma mater he adores. “Even for a football school, that was really unusual.”

“Oh, it was on another level,” Goldsmith said. “Everybody had LSU in the windows, stores, houses, everywhere. … If you drove up and down the bayou around then, it was all purple and gold everywhere.” Add the fact that LSU Coach Ed Orgeron hails from the region and Goldsmith said, “It’s amazing for us down here to have someone from here being on that kind of stage.”

“If you think about a few things we’re serious about, politics, food and football probably rise into the top three,” Hunter said before going into a meeting with an Internet company to discuss its slow response to his citizenry. “I don’t care where you live in Louisiana or what school you went to — there’s a certain amount of pride in seeing our flagship university getting that type of national recognition.”

Only in 2020, of course, could a parade for a national title come to have a doctor and LSU fan, O’Neal, wonder, “Now I think of it as a possible covid event.” Only in Louisiana in 2020 could Mardi Gras, with its joy blanketing the bygone February, end up a surefire covid-19 event. “I think everything is more extreme here,” said Bardes, the native New Yorker. “Everything is more vivid. If Louisiana were an easy place to live, everybody would live here. The colors are brighter. This is an exuberant place. This is a dramatic place. This is a place that appreciates public performance.”

Now, as Roberts pointed out, covid-19 has left New Orleans further from its essence than perhaps any other place.

He noted “the lack of human contact necessitated by the sheltering we’re doing now” and said: “So New Orleans has lost a lot in terms of the social climate here. The money and the people coming into the city around Jazz Fest in May, which got destroyed by covid. The way people feel about the loss of those things seems to be really acute. In a city where so much of the culture and economy are tied to that socializing and that necessity of being in groups, it seems to be really having an effect on the population.”

He said he finds that population “kind of down in the mouth as a way that’s unique to New Orleans.” Seemingly everyone, he said, knows someone who has been sick, making the virus even more of an “omnipresence.”

Down in Galliano, Goldsmith and his restaurant employees “always wore masks at the [to-go] window,” which became “the only point of contact that we had with the outside world.” He had an older employee ask to stay home, so he took over her shift until she returned. Having a to-go window actually increased business slightly, but at the same time his grandfather’s truck-stop business has closed.

“Just this past week and not even like a big, huge hurricane,” Goldsmith said of the wind throwing water onto Louisiana Highway 1, leaving it “completely flooded south of Golden Meadow.” He said: “I was talking to my grandfather today; he said he’s never, in the 40 years he’s had the place, he’s never had it this bad. He said he’s closed more days this year because of water and storms than all the other years he’s had it [combined].”

Bardes, the adoptive Louisianian from New York, said he spoke “as a private citizen, not as a historian,” as he said: “It’s hard not to be very, very fearful of the future. The state is coming out of the end of this incredible health disaster to find climate change again promising this endless cycle of storms.” Louisiana, he said, “is a place of tremendous hope and spirit, and athletics are part of that. It’s just hard to not face the reality that Louisiana is in jeopardy, at least the southern part.”

He added: “We are a tourism economy in an age when there’s no tourism. We are a restaurant economy in an age when no one can eat out. And we are an oil and gas economy at a time when the oil and gas extraction is drowning us.” That feeling might not consume the whole state, he said. “But everybody along the coast is very aware of this. People have watched in their lifetimes their farms slip into the [water]. They’ve watched forest turn into saltwater marsh, and they’re seeing this in real time. … You see seasonal flooding bring the water higher and higher around landmarks in your neighborhood.”

In the second year ever in which the National Hurricane Center has exhausted its alphabet of names for storms, Hunter has seen the earliest 12th storm on record, Laura, hit his 80,000-strong city. He has overseen the rebuilding of an electrical grid. He has met with the Internet company everyone finds lacking. He has seen the debris pickup speed up relative to that benchmark from 2005, Hurricane Rita, because some longtime members of his administration have drawn from experience from that disaster.

“I will say this,” he said. “I will sleep a lot better when this hurricane season is over.”

It’s not yet, and it’s a reality felt by Roberts’s students. “Nobody’s surprised, and nobody’s up in arms, and they’ve just become accustomed to it. … We’ve inculcated the culture of Louisiana storms and those kinds of things and the issues that have resulted from the climate. So there’s a certain sense of community there.”

Enter football. Goldsmith said fans on the bayou feared it wouldn’t happen and are grateful it will, even if they wish it were more than just conference games and even if it can’t resemble the 13th night of this dramatic year. Some see it as a possible distraction, with Bardes ranking it among Louisiana’s “wonderful array” of bedazzlements, even as Roberts finds his students leery of any stadium or tailgating. Then there’s that dual feeling of knowing Louisiana’s demonstrated resiliency while wishing it didn’t have to be so often demonstrated.

“Our year in Louisiana has been one of resiliency,” O’Neal said one day in August. “ … I sent a thank-you note today to one of our businesses for donating $60,000 to the hospital. I have never seen so much community [engagement]. I don’t know that the championship was the high point. I think our high point is yet to come.”

Said Roberts: “I feel like the kinds of experience have created the expectation that, no matter how awful the situation is now, New Orleanians will reclaim New Orleans when this is all over. … The expectation is that New Orleanians are champing at the bit to get back on the street, so the minute this thing is over …”

Then he laughed and continued: “There’s going to be a very festival-like explosion in New Orleans when this is all over. The problem people are having now is, how long is that tunnel before we can get back to that light?”

“It’s been a hell of a year, man,” Hunter said. “I don’t even know if I could find the right words to describe it. I have a history degree from McNeese, and I try to put things in a historical perspective.” He thought of 20th century years and said: “I think 2020 might be one for the history books when it’s all said and done. But my biggest hope is that, when people look back, they will be proud of how we responded to it.”