And in what sense would "all be lost" if a limited overs game that had scant significance to begin with and had been reduced to utter meaninglessness hadn't taken place? Under the circumstances, it seems dismally insensitive to refer to loss in any context other than acknowledging the unbearable loss suffered by the slain children's families.
Across the Tasman, where they must be running out of black armbands, a nation that has only just finished grieving Hughes is embarking on another bout of national mourning for the two hostages killed in the Martin Place siege.
Once again we are left contemplating the penetrating truth of the aphorism, often misattributed to Joseph Stalin, that the death of one person is a tragedy, but the death of a million is a statistic.
Rupert Murdoch seemed to regard the hostage deaths as first and foremost a big news story, congratulating his Sydney tabloid the Daily Telegraph for getting a scoop on the "bloody outcome". The leathery old reptile's been doing it tough lately, what with the UK phone hacking scandal forcing him to close the News of the World and his young wife developing a marriage-wrecking crush on one of the few major public figures held in even lower regard than himself, former British prime minister turned tarnished statesman for hire Tony Blair.
But we should give Murdoch a pass on this one and accept that, of necessity, the news industry views major events, including tragedies, as challenges and opportunities. Just as operating theatre staff can swap banter while a patient is being carved up like a Christmas turkey, so journalists must distance themselves from the events they cover in order to function professionally.
And at least Murdoch wasn't as crass as his former protege, the infamous Kelvin MacKenzie. When the space shuttle Challenger exploded on a slow news day in January 1986, MacKenzie galvanised the Sun newsroom by bellowing, "God bless America."
There was a small outbreak of sanity in international affairs this week with the USA and Cuba agreeing to restore diplomatic relations which had been severed since 1961.
When historians of the future pick over the rise and fall of the American Empire, they will surely identify its Cuba policy as one of its greatest follies, perhaps second only to the catastrophic War on Drugs.
Like the War on Drugs, shunning Cuba has achieved the exact opposite of what was intended: instead of bringing down the Castro brothers' Communist regime, the anti-Castro campaign and economic embargo shored it up. Fidel and Raul Castro have ruled Cuba since 1959, in the process seeing off 10 US presidents.
But as a US diplomat once observed, Cuba has the same effect on American politicians as the full moon has on werewolves.
Displaying pulverising stupidity and detachment from reality, Republican Senator Marco Rubio said: "It potentially goes a long way in providing the economic lift that the Castro regime needs to become a permanent fixture in Cuba for generations to come." The regime came to power 12 years before 43-year-old Rubio was born.
Cuban-American Rubio obviously isn't familiar with the Cuban joke in which Fidel Castro is given a Galapagos turtle. On discovering they live for 100 years, he returns the turtle to the donor saying, "The trouble with pets is that you get attached to them and then they die on you."
