[COPY] Prayers for Damar Hamlin

Do we pray for the sport, too?

As of 8:55 Monday night, football ceased to be a game.

That’s a temporary condition, of course. The show will go on, at some undetermined time. Anthems will be performed and coins tossed. Bodies will resume flying swiftly and with fury. We do love our football.

For a brief moment, though, football is finished. As I write this, nobody whose expertise counts is saying what happened to Damar Hamlin, the 24-year-old, second-year safety for the Buffalo Bills.

Social media is running hot, naturally. A tweet from Jordon Rooney, apparently a friend of Hamlin’s from Pittsburgh and a man who helps Hamlin with marketing, appeared at about 10:45 Monday night:

His vitals are back to normal and they have put him to sleep to put a breathing tube down his throat. They are currently running tests.

Midway through the 1st quarter, the Bengals Tee Higgins caught a short, crossing-pattern pass from Joe Burrow. Hamlin tackled Higgins quickly, got up and immediately fell backward, as if he were a 6-foot log in a 90 mile-an-hour wind.

It wasn’t an unusually violent hit, by football standards. The response it provoked wasn’t to be believed, if only because we’d never seen anything like it. The players knew something was terribly wrong. They wept, they covered their eyes, they looked up in prayer and down in sadness. Some walked away. A gurney was in place, briefly. Then the ambulance arrived

The ESPN announcer Joe Buck said EMTs were “frantically administering CPR.’’ That suggested Damar Hamlin’s heart had stopped. The 65,000-plus at Paycor were as silent as a prayer. Maybe the fans were pondering football’s passing, at least for one night.

There’s no blame here. I suspect that even when all the facts are made plain, that will still be the case. Blame isn’t important, because it won’t help Hamlin. What would have prevented this? Who knows? Maybe it wasn’t even football that caused it. Even if the game were to blame, how could we fix it?

Better equipment? More penalties for dangerous hits? They’re all dangerous. Limit the violence? Without violence, there is no football.

It is useful to remember, in the endless hype, that football athletes are human beings. Not cyborgs, not indestructible warriors from the Marvel catalog, but people whose armor and muscles aren’t guaranteed to protect them. Not to put too dramatic point on it, but these are brave people.

“I don’t recall ever seeing an ambulance on the field,’’ noted ESPN’s Adam Schefter, who has seen more football than most. “The worst night you could ever possibly imagine,’’ said Dave Lapham, who has seen more football than Schefter.

The game was postponed. It will be re-started, nobody yet knows when, because that’s not important right now. In the deafening silence at Paycor Stadium and in the muted living rooms all over the country, a worst football fear had been realized.

In private, we spoke the unspeakable and thought the unthinkable. Then on national TV, we witnessed something we never thought we would, while also conceding it was always possible. A football player lay motionless on the field, his heart apparently having stopped.

Hamlin fell at 8:55 p.m. The league called the game at approximately 10:01. They initially considered a 5-minute “break,’’ but quickly realized how ridiculous that would be. After the commissioner talked to the players association, they agreed postponement was the only option. For one evening, football was pronounced dead.

Nobody was predicting when Bengals-Bills would resume. Canceling this game or any game wouldn’t change anything. It’s football. That doesn’t mean this didn’t give us pause. It still scared the hell out of us. We won’t stop watching, not at all.

Football is dead. Long live football.