After those experiences, I had come to wonder secretly whether their business model was simply returning negative results. But on Tuesday, my rapid test came back positive. I don’t know how the rapid tests work, but the physician’s assistant told me over the phone, “It was a pretty clear positive.”

So, I went straight down to the basement and quarantined. My wife pulled our children out of school.

My symptoms haven’t been that bad. The literal “fever dreams” are the most unpleasant part — I alternate between asleep and awake, trying to figure out if my stressful dreams are reality. The headache on Tuesday morning was made worse by my having grown totally unaccustomed to illness over the past 19 months. But basically, I feel I have a cold.

Some doctors tell me not to take ibuprofen, but as far as I can tell, that’s based on a single, rushed study from March 2020. Other doctors tell me to take Advil if that makes me feel better.

I cannot suppress the desire to know where I got it from. At one point last week, someone kind of coughed on me — but that seems too long before my symptoms set in. I attended a reception last Thursday night and so have reached out to the people I could remember talking to — both to warn them I may have infected them and to see if maybe they were the source.

Of course, I do not blame the person who gave it to me. Nobody forced me to socialize last week. And at this point, the virus is well on its way to becoming endemic. I have long stated that everyone will get COVID sooner or later.

One guy I contacted on Wednesday, because I had sat at a table and talked with him for 30 minutes or so last week, told me that he had COVID twice and that he still has diminished smell and taste.

“That’s been the worst part for me.”

I can’t tell yet how COVID is affecting my sense of smell because I am congested and have had diminished smell ever since John Ciampi (God rest his soul) hit me in the face with a fastball in 10th grade. (The worst part of that, for me, was the part when the fastball hit me in the face.)

The second-worst part of COVID for me so far is the quarantine. All day long, I’m in a dark basement guestroom, whose overhead light fixture I’ve been meaning to replace.

My wife and children will, thanks to my infection, miss multiple parties this week, including one guitar-and-ukelele-and-banjo gathering with old friends we call a “hootenanny.” I will miss a week of teaching Sunday school, will miss Mass on Sunday, and am imposing so much more work and burden on my wife because I am hiding in this basement all day.

The very worst part is the worry that I may have infected someone else. I don’t know exactly when I caught it. I don’t know whether to count early Sunday morning (when, my wife says, the snoring was unprecedented) or Monday evening (when I got a runny nose) as the onset of my symptoms. In any event, I was possibly contagious Saturday morning when I spent a couple of hours in a U-Haul helping my brother-in-law load up for a move.

So far, I’ve checked with everyone I could think of being a close contact on Friday through Monday. None of them has symptoms, they tell me.

Thanks to my age, my relative health, and my vaccination in the spring, I was never too worried about getting it bad. My main concern was ruining my wife and children’s fun and possibly infecting someone who might suffer worse symptoms than I have.

Thankfully, we are past the point where any decent people posit that some people deserve to get infected or that infection is some sign of moral failure. Some of the most cautious people in America have gotten COVID. They will keep getting it. Every year, perhaps.

Could I have avoided the virus? Maybe, had I decided I wouldn’t go to any of the events I went to. But then, I was supposed to be in Israel last week for a religious pilgrimage, but that country’s changing COVID rules forced my group to cancel our trip. So it was COVID restrictions in the end that indirectly led to my getting sick.

Less anecdotally, last school year, remote learners in my county got COVID far more often than in-school students.

We are all going to get it. The best we can do is to try not to infect the vulnerable and get vaccinated to minimize the risk of severe symptoms. And then, try to make quarantine as bearable as possible.

Maybe the Red Sox and the Braves can help me with that last part.