The biggest news came early in head coach Pat Fitzgerald’s Zoom call with media on Friday.

The player whose positive COVID-19 test last Friday caused the Wildcats to “pause” practice was actually a false-positive, the coach announced. The team quarantined a total of 37 players, and all of them tested negative.

“We are still batting 1.000,” Fitzgerald boasted. “We’ve had zero positive tests.”

That’s the good news for Northwestern, and for a sport whose season seems to be on the brink on a daily basis. Northwestern was the sixth Big Ten school to suspend practice at one point over the summer, and, as it turned out, it wasn’t even necessary.

It means that, as Fitzgerald said, “Our plan and the execution of our plan has been flawless.”

But that false-positive’s impact on the program brings up more questions than it answers. That one false-positive test essentially brought a program to a screeching halt for six days, almost a full week, from Aug. 1 through Aug. 6.

Is that sustainable to play a season? Would the Wildcats have been able to play a game if that false-positive had occurred in, say, mid-September rather than early August?

Fitzgerald didn’t really have an answer to that question when asked.

“I think it’s day by day. I think it’s choice by choice,” he said.

Really, he shouldn’t be expected to have an answer. Just like all of us, Fitzgerald is learning on the fly, too.

Fitzgerald, who is entering his 15th season as Northwestern’s boss, got a call from the football program's medical team last Friday night, during a late dinner after a round of what he called “really bad golf.” By Saturday morning, the doctors decided that the program’s best response would be to pause workouts.

So that’s exactly what Fitzgerald did. The call to suspend practice was “all in the hands of the medical team.”

Through contract tracing, 37 Wildcat players were identified to have been exposed, and they were quarantined. By mid-week, after “retesting multiple times,” the program learned that the initial positive test was a false-positive, and that all 37 players had tested negative.

They were given the all-clear to resume workouts by the medical team and could have gotten back to work as early as Thursday. They decided that waiting until Friday, the first official day of fall camp, would be “the right decision,” according to Fitzgerald.

The Wildcats currently have 115 players on their roster. If that false-positive test had come back positive during the season, they would have had 78 players who could have still participated in practice. That could theoretically be enough to prepare for a game on Saturday.

But how practical that is depends on who those missing players are. If a half-dozen starters and a few key players were among them -- say, Peyton Ramsey and Riley Lees on offense, and Paddy Fisher and JR Pace on defense -- NU would have been in trouble.

Fitzgerald and his team are currently operating in what he called “a pseudo-bubble,” a reference to the highly regulated bubbles NBA and NHL teams are currently utilizing. The program is taking every precaution to keep players safe, but he knows that they have their limits. He can just look at Major League Baseball, which also operates in somewhat of a pseudo-bubble and has seen a handful of infected teams wreak havoc on the schedule, with a total of 24 postponed games and counting.

Fitzgerald said he’s not too worried about his players when they’re in the Walter Athletics Center or practicing on Hutcheson Field. “It’s the other 20 hours that I think is a challenge for every college football player,” he said.

Keep in mind that right now, Northwestern’s campus, and every campus across America, is pretty much empty. So the players don’t have many opportunities to be exposed to the virus.

Once students get back on campus, however, it’s a different story. That’s why Fitzgerald is looking at a much bigger picture than just his football program when he talks about being “great stewards of the community.” He is talking to everyone at Northwestern, from players and coaches to students, faculty and staff members.

At one point during the call, Fitzgerald did a pantomime to get his point across. He pulled out an all-black mask and put it over his face. “Wear these,” he said. He put his hands up in front of his camera. "Wash these,” he said. Then, he added, “and make great choices.”

Fitzgerald said that he keeps a mask in his pocket at all times and tries to stay six feet away from everyone in his daily life outside of his job. He has limited himself and his family to “the same people and the same friends” socially.

Everyone in the Northwestern campus community, he says, has to do the same thing in order for the Wildcats to play this season.

“We’ve got to do this together if we want to pull off football,” he said. “If we want sports, and we want school, that’s what needs to happen.”