Nobody smiles, and shows urgency, at the same time like a high school principal.
Paul Mihalko was proving it Thursday evening, as he quickly strode to the microphone.
Morgantown High School’s 137th Commencement, a social-distanced affair for a senior year that wasn’t, had just punched the gas on the turf of Pony Lewis Field.
Right at the same time that gang of clouds overhead began to resemble a kid’s water-color painting.
A very angry kid’s water-color painting.
Rain.
Which is what the principal was hoping to avoid.
His words emerging from the PA system amounted to an on-the-fly haiku: For the Class of 2020, COVID-19 and the evening weather report.
We’ve got stuff moving in up there.
We’ll keep with the program.
And see what happens next.
Some 330 graduating seniors from a class of more than 400 chose to come out and turn tassels for the event on the football field.
The pandemic was the school bully.
Mihalko said he spent the spring trying to get the seniors to focus on what they did have, despite everything that came down.
“Positives,” he said, minutes before the ceremony.
“I want them to focus on the fact that they’re finally here.”
Seniors found their seats to the recorded strains of “Life is a Highway,” a radio-friendly song from 1992 which has morphed into a paean of the American road trip over the years.
Even if it was written and originally performed by a Canadian, who was talking about world hunger in West Africa.
There was the commencement-requisite, “Oh, the places you’ll go,” Dr. Seuss’ sing-song rhyme about venturing forth — with brains in your head and feet in your shoes.
Teachers, staffers and administrators from Mon Schools each read a stanza for the video that played on the scoreboard.
It wasn’t a love song, though.
Everyone on the field and in the bleachers was wearing a facial covering of some kind, given the coronavirus.
At least two students took a knee during the recorded playing of the National Anthem, given the country’s unrest.
Right now, Liam Caudill’s highway is going to unspool in the municipal limits of Morgantown.
He’s going to WVU. He wants be a teacher.
Math or history, in high school.
“It was a struggle at times,” he said, of his year.
“But I don’t want say that I’m glad it’s over.”
The ebullient Zyaire Woods, meanwhile, didn’t want it to end.
A devastating stroke he suffered as a kid bent him to a wheelchair and robbed him of his speech.
His personality, and his smile, however, both had ways of knocking any social distance out of the way Thursday.
Zy — that’s how everyone knows him — got big applause as he held his diploma aloft in triumph.
Asritha Sure, the senior class president, finished her remarks right before those clouds overhead made their decision.
Rueful chuckles (Of course, it was gonna rain) were elicited by the weather pattern.
“We didn’t get to do everything we wanted,” the president said.
“But we did everything we could.”
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Zyaire Woods expresses his enthusiasm while waiting for his diploma at Morgantown High. 
Morgantown High School Senior Class President Asritha Sure speaks during graduation. 
Jadyn Davis addresses the MHS class of 2020 during Thursday’s ceremony.
