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Match day, a hallmark of thousands of graduating medical students’ nascent careers, came and went without the usual celebratory feel this year.

Typically graduating medical students gather with friends and family on the third Friday in March to tear open envelopes that reveal which U.S. residency programs they will train in for the next three to seven years.

Instead, with social distancing practices in place because of the coronavirus pandemic, flights were canceled and ceremonies were called off, and soon-to-be residents were left to find scaled-back ways of marking the occasion.

“We just got an email, a plain old email that said where we were matching,” said Alex Kokaly, a medical student at the University of Michigan who matched at U.C.L.A. for internal medicine.

Some celebrated alone or with small groups of friends.

Jonas Attilus, a public health masters student at Rutgers who matched at Boston Medical Center for internal medicine, found out the news with a friend, who captured the moment.

Others turned to video chats and social media to find alternative ways to share their joy and maintain the tradition, giving life to the hashtags #virtualmatchday and #distancematch.

Christle Nwora, a medical student at McGovern Medical School at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, arranged simultaneous Zoom and FaceTime calls with friends and family and invited a small group of friends over for her match reveal. She is headed to Johns Hopkins for a residency in internal medicine and pediatrics.

A record 40,084 applicants submitted program choices for 37,256 positions, the most ever offered in the main residency match. Many said the current crisis, and the restrictions that come with it, only served to reinforce the sense of duty they felt toward their chosen fields.

Even so, some disappointment was inevitable. Ms. Nwora had used the idea of match day as an incentive to power through the tougher moments of medical school.

“People talk about how special of a time your last semester of medical school is because you finally have made it through all of the requirements, you are planning celebrations, people are getting married, this is the time that people are having kids, they’re traveling the world, and you’ve got match day to celebrate,” she said.

Still, the extreme circumstances still came with benefits.

“Friends and family who wouldn’t have been able to actually physically be there for the event had it carried on as normal were actually able to get on Zoom and participate for 15 minutes without having to make all the travel arrangements,” Ms. Nwora said.

Some even took the opportunity to give the match ceremonies a creative flair.

One of Ms. Nwora’s friends decided to use a piñata for his reveal. Another used balloons that, when popped, revealed which program they would be attending.