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It is the little things we take for granted, the holding of a life in one’s hand, breathing on your own, which we feared Damar Hamlin might never be able to do again.
Then painstakingly slowly, but surely, as so many of us prayed to keep hope alive, to keep a human angel alive, Damar Hamlin has begun to breathe on his own again, and talk again, and become everyone’s Miracle Man.
There have been so many heroes — from the first responders who rescued him from cardiac arrest, to the medical men and sports psychologists in charge of mental health, to the team chaplain whose job it has been to soothe the restless souls of young men who have forever dreamed of becoming one of Sunday’s heroes, to the intensive care doctors and nurses at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center, to Bills coach Sean McDermott and his players, to the profile-in-courage of a mother who rode in the ambulance by her fallen son’s side to the hospital and refused to surrender any more than he did.
So now, for three hours on Sunday, between those white lines at the Linc from 4:25 p.m. until around 7:25 p.m., it might not be as difficult for the New York Football Giants — not to mention the 31 other teams, but especially the Buffalo Bills — to try to keep Damar Hamlin in the deepest recesses of their mind, if only because of the violent business they’ve chosen, of the life they’ve chosen.
Now, it might not be as difficult for those players to search for an answer to daunting questions that had been haunting many of them when the news about Hamlin was at its grimmest and most frightening:
Is it still too soon for us to be remorseless football players? Is it still too soon for us to be bullies? Is it still too soon for us to be merchants of punishment in a game of blocking and tackling and roughing the passer and personal fouls, a game that demands that “winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing”?
“If you’re thinking about something other than blocking Linval Joseph or Fletcher Cox, you’re gonna get your butt whupped,” Giants center Jon Feliciano, formerly with the Bills, told The Post.
