Rummaging around in dictionaries, I stumbled upon the expression "poderoso caballero es Don Dinero" – literally "Lord Money is a powerful gentleman (or horseman)".

Throughout all my years as a sportswriter, the heaviest hitters in the sector have been "poderosos caballeros".

The peak for sheer prestige probably came in the noughties, when the race for the 2012 Olympics and Paralympics was a slugfest for the ages featuring London, Paris, New York, Moscow and Madrid, and sport was allotted a prominent place at Davos, the powerful people's conference in the Swiss Alps.

But if you are talking about Don Dinero, well, for football and a number of other big-ticket properties, including the Olympics, the telephone-number digits kept clicking up long after that, even if the years of stupendous growth appeared to be behind us.

So it has been quite a turnaround in recent weeks to see the likes of FIFA President Gianni Infantino and his International Olympic Committee (IOC) counterpart, Thomas Bach, rendered so completely and utterly powerless.

Oh sure, there is stuff to be getting on with: I got a media release from FIFA only yesterday about a coronavirus-related fundraising football match "to help the world"; Bach and his colleagues, meanwhile, must busy themselves with re-planning Tokyo 2020; both organisations have huge reserves and, hence, decisions to be made regarding if and how to dip into them.

But when it comes to anything with a long-term horizon, the future has suddenly been ripped out of their hands, by an invisible microbe.

For men who have spent their entire career in the executive suites surfing the wave of international sport's 40-year boom, it must be more than a little disorientating.

At last week's IOC media teleconference I thought I sensed in Bach a level of glumness, resignation almost, that I had not encountered in him in nearly two decades of periodic observation.

It may have been some effect of the remote technology; I may even be entirely mistaken.

But a subsequent conversation with a media colleague has made it plain that I was not alone in reacting this way.

If I were to clamber inside the top sports leaders' heads, my hunch is that I would find a) the torment of not knowing how long it will take to vanquish COVID-19 and of being able to do next to nothing to speed along the whole laborious business, but also b) that the natural buoyancy of these alpha-males (and, yes, occasionally, -females) had been punctured by the graphic demonstration that sport, their storied domain, is not in the end all that important.

What is more, in times of crisis such as the one we are all, one way or another, now experiencing, grass-roots sport, or physical exercise as we might also refer to it, is a good deal more important than its elite adjunct, for all that the return to TV screens of top-level football may help to pass the time for a locked-down populace.

This brutal reality-check is unlikely to make it any easier, once some semblance of normality is restored, to revive a business model for elite sport that had been looking creaky for three or four years.

So, is there any hint of a silver lining, or am I determined to paint everything black?

Well, I am pleased to say, Yes there is - and a very considerable one at that, at least for us fans.

It is simply this: top-level sport was brilliant before it had money.

I am not going to try and argue that getting rich quick made sport worse: my personal top ten most memorable sporting moments would include plenty from before the 1980s; but I suspect this is, at least in part, because I was a child of the 1960s and a teenager of the 1970s.

Money initially fulfilled the critical function of making it possible for sport to exercise a considerable degree of autonomy from meddling Governments.

Had money not arrived when it did and been put to use when it was, the whole history of the sector through the past half-century would have looked very different.

There can also be little doubt that the top athletes of today are fitter and technically better informed and drilled than any other athletes ever; this too, in large part, is a consequence of money.

What I do not think money has done, not all that much, is improve the spectacle, or the sheer life-affirming joy of seeing an astonishing feat, or watching your team win a cup, medal or league.

Nor is money necessary for athletes to be viewed as role models for the young.

So you see, even if COVID-19 turns out to have doomed the sports business as we know it – and I think a) that the odds are still against this for now, and b) that the overall picture might yet brighten very fast – come what may, intense, magical sport is going to survive.

Yes, we would miss some of the colourful hangers-on that have been drawn to the sector by the conspicuous wealth that the most lavish broadcasting rights deals have financed; but what really matters will still be there.