Wednesday’s news hit like a shock wave that somehow felt unexpected but could have somehow been seen coming from miles away:

Nick Saban has coronavirus and will miss the Iron Bowl.

They say the only unavoidable truths in this life are death and taxes, but this development cements a third truth — Auburn luck is unmatched. What gave us Punt, Bama, Punt and the Kick-6 and whatever last season’s end of the first half was has begotten this development:

Nick Saban won’t coach Alabama this week, in the Crimson Tide’s biggest game of the year.

Alabama fans have no other option than to feel exactly this way. The law of statistics extrapolates that the proverbial pendulum has to swing Alabama’s way sometimes with the Iron Bowl luck. And yes, anyone advocating for luck to be afforded to a college football program that probably needs multiple people to attach national championship banners to flagpoles on game day sounds slightly ridiculous at face value.

But c’mon … give any college football team their choice of removing 1 heartbeat on the Crimson Tide sideline before they play, and who do you really think they’re going to choose?

In the aftermath of Saban’s Lazarus-like return to the Crimson Tide following a flurry of false-positive tests late in the Georgia week, many in the program talked about how challenging it was for the team to prepare without Lord Saban fine-tuning the Death Star to maximum effectiveness.

So imagine how Alabama is faring right now, knowing Saban won’t be around to game-plan another 60 minutes of Joyless Murderball in person for the 22nd-ranked Tigers?

“He will follow all appropriate guidelines and isolate at home,” team physician Dr. Jimmy Robinson and head athletic trainer Jeff Allen said in the statement.

That right there? That’s what doom feels like, Alabama Nation.

Leaving defensive coordinator Pete Golding to his own devices in the face of what has always been a Sugar Huddle-licious Gus Malzahn offense is a recipe for disaster. Because if Malzahn has frustrated Alabama as much as it has with Saban on the sideline as a moderating influence on the Crimson Tide defense, imagine what a cluster it will be with Golding trying to crack the Tigers’ code by himself?

Saban indicated Wednesday that offensive coordinator Steve Sarkisian will handle many of Saban’s game-day duties Saturday at Bryant-Denny Stadium. Whether that means Cedric Burns will be trailing Sark with a cup of Gatorade is anyone’s guess, but handing over the keys to a Crimson-painted Bugatti to someone who wrecked a Southern Cal-vanity-plated Kia is never a bad thing, right?

“Well, as it is right now, if you tested positive, you can have no communication with the sidelines, as I understand it,” Saban confirmed on the weekly SEC coaches teleconference. “So Sark’s been a head coach for many years and very successful at it. He’ll still continue to call the plays. We won’t really change anything other than the fact that some of the administrative, game-day decisions, he’ll have to be involved in. So we really will discuss that more. We discussed that when I went through this 3-day hiatus before the Georgia game, we discussed exactly how we’d do that. But we’ll be a little more specific about that later in the week.”

And while we are neither at the confirm nor deny end of the rumor business, there very much exists the possibility that Auburn planted COVID-19 in Saban’s ecosphere to sabotage him for the Iron Bowl.

“I have no idea (how I contracted COVID-19),” Saban said. “I’m around nobody. I go home, and I go to the office. I have no idea. Now there are some people in and out of our house on occasion. I have no idea how this happened. I really don’t know. We really practice social tracing, social distancing, all the things that we need to do to be safe. We’re always 6 feet apart in meetings, whether we have staff meetings in large rooms. Everyone is required and we all wear masks. Players all wear masks in meetings.”

For what it’s worth, our friends in the desert reacted to the Saban news with a collective yawn. The Crimson Tide is still giving anywhere between 24 and 26 points — for entertainment purposes only, of course — because logic suggests that Saban wouldn’t throw a single pass or make a single tackle even if he didn’t have the sniffles.

But this ain’t Vegas. This is the real world, a place we have seen more Auburn-related demons than we care talk about out loud. We have seen Mark Ingram inexplicably fumble a ball 25 yards stick-pin straight through the back of an end zone, we have seen Bo Jackson awarded a touchdown over the top despite never breaking the plain, and we have seen 109 yards of field-goal return that really shouldn’t even be spoken of again.

Which is why it pains us to say this: the only possible thing that could stop Alabama this season is Alabama. Nick Saban IS Alabama, and without him prowling the home sideline Saturday afternoon, the Crimson Tide could very well fall victim to the biggest voodoo doll ever constructed in Lee County.