They did it.

       Maybe it was the collective magic of all the inside-out pajamas and ritualistic ice-cube flushing. Or the sheer exhaustion of a nearly two-year quasi-digital pandemic existence made it happen.

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       Whatever the reason, the kids won. And one of the soul-crushing, potential outcomes of our national deep dive into virtual learning during the pandemic — the end of snow days — did not come to pass.

       “Snow Day!!!”said thousands of kids across the Eastern Seaboard, as what was supposed to be the first school day of 2022 became a day off.

       Does the pandemic mean the end of snowdays, too?

       There was the quiet fall of fat snowflakes, snowball fights and hot cocoa — a nostalgic turn and a salve in these upside-down times.

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       “True snow days are rare and I appreciate my daughter getting the chance to go outside and enjoy it, instead of sitting at the table all day doing Zoom calls,” said Hyattsville father Brian Minter.

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       His 9-year-old is a student in a Prince George’s County school, where students will be learning virtually until mid-January because of the spike in coronavirus infections. Even though they would be online anyway, the school district declared an old-school snow day.

       “I don’t want our teachers or school staff on the roads or trying to manage teaching while dealing with their own kids,” Minter said. “Remote school is so hard on kids and educators; I’m glad PGCPS extended a grace day.”

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       It was a surprise decision by the school system, and it got some guff on social media from the hardcore folks who didn’t understand why kids going to school online needed a snow day.

       Because what Prince George’s County was doing — a brief return to pandemic, virtual school — makes sense. And once students and teachers got into the groove of online learning, shouldn’t education be like the U.S. Postal Service, where “neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night” would stop knowledge from being delivered to young minds. (Well, online school did become like the Postal Service — the flailing one that’s $87 million in the hole, with a high failure-to-deliver rate.) Virtual school was a mixed bag, with high costs for digital retrofitting that didn’t reach everyone. Millions of students fell behind and studies showed the most vulnerable were hardest hit. Report cards had record numbers of F’s and thousands of students simply dropped out.

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       Educators weren’t convinced that going virtual would be an easy answer for things like snow days.

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       Some schools hadn’t planned for it, and teachers and students didn’t go into winter break with all the equipment needed to go virtual. Other school districts understood how difficult it is for teachers to hold online classes while their own small children are at home. A snow day made more sense for the districts that were planning for in-person school.

       Teachers and school administrators put an exclamation mark on some of their school closure announcements:

       “Old school snow day — no virtual! Enjoy an extra vacation day!” wrote Miss G.

       “Enjoy another snow day! There will NOT be any virtual learning scheduled,” proclaimed the Holy Spirit School in Annandale.

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       But for every winner, there is almost always a loser. This time, it was parents, families and caretakers who shouldered yet another responsibility with school closures.

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       Because virtual work went on as planned, and parents who finally got their work lives back when kids physically returned to school were whiplashed with the return of rowdy snow kids with no online class and let’s-kick-off-2022 Zoom meetings with the boss.

       Richard Seroter, a tech bigwig out in Washington state, had his work day whacked by a Seattle snow day.

       “I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened,” Seroter wrote on Twitter, attributing that to both: “Obi-Wan Kenobi and every parent in this district who heard the 1st day back to school was canceled due to snow”

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       A huge percentage of these parents also battled coronavirus infections over winter break as D.C. became the nation’s omicron variant epicenter. (That’s what we did for the 12 days of Christmas … “four coronavirus tests, three Motrin, two toilets full…”).

       D.C. went from low infection rates to becoming the omicron hotspot

       So yet another curveball for families who have been stretched to the max may not feel all that hot chocolaty.

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       “On this snowy Monday, schools up and down the East Coast are closing,” HUD Secretary Marcia L. Fudge tweeted. “And while for many young ones, a snow day is a treasured memory unlike any other, some children rely on their schools for meals, clean water, and a warm place to spend the day.”

       True, snow days are another way to realize and understand the disparity and division around us. And the work we have ahead of us before we can all enjoy the giddiness of that school announcement.