The full impact of the coronavirus pandemic will not be fully understood until long after it’s over. The final accounting of the devastation to our communities, our culture, and our healthcare institutions will be sobering and may lead to permanent changes in our way of life, and certainly in how we practice. One principle that has guided me through a long career in orthopedic surgery is that if you have the perseverance to find it, every cloud has a silver lining. Musculoskeletal injury and disease and the complicated course through reconstructive surgery can dramatically overturn what was seemingly a patient’s stable lifestyle. Yet the courage and perseverance required for recovery often results in a reward, a positive life experience that leads to meaningful change for the better. When dealing with my most challenging cases, I am in constant search for that silver lining.

It is hard to conceive of a silver lining arising from the pandemic. Our busy practices were shut down to allow our institutions to care for the sudden onslaught of the critically ill. Most of us were forced to retreat into quarantine as our clinical practices were suspended. This issue of HSS Journal, however, illustrates a silver lining to this disruptive catastrophe. Many of our colleagues used this time to complete research and write, thereby taking advantage of this unscheduled time to advance their scholarship and the fund of knowledge in our field. My grandfather was an academic general surgeon in his prime in the mid-twentieth century. One piece of his advice I have carried through my own career is: “If you are busy don’t complain, if it is slow write a paper, and if at all possible stay out of the politics.” It appears our authors contributing to this issue were privy to his counsel.

This special online issue of HSS Journal represents the incredible effort of our community to be productive during the darkest hours of the pandemic. This is in addition to the special issue we published this fall on COVID-19; see “COVID-19: An Unprecedented Threat, a Historic Response,” by that issue’s guest editor, C. Ronald MacKenzie, MD: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11420-020-09815-y. Here, we present 42 papers that cover multiple disciplines of musculoskeletal care. These papers are current, well written, and informative. I am confident that this issue will be widely read and esteemed as a valuable resource for future research and clinical care.

If the disruption of the recent months were not enough, HSS Journal will be published with the help of a new publisher beginning in 2021. Springer has been a supportive partner for 15 years. Springer enabled us to launch our journal and provided the support we needed to grow and thrive. As change is an inevitable part of our world, circumstances have led us to seek a new partner for the journal, which we have found in SAGE. We will be forever grateful for the partnership we had with Springer. Yet we look forward with eager anticipation to our future with SAGE.