Faced with the regrettable facts—a troubled man dies a lonely death—we resort to hocus-pocus theorizing about tau proteins and fibrillary tangles. It’s a form of denial: By obsessing over hidden trauma, we ignore what’s right in front of us. Many ex-NFL players have sad and difficult lives.

Tripucka, a man most football fans did not know until this week, is quoted in an article from First-and-Orange, a Denver Broncos fan blog, as saying that he would be “honored” if Manning wore his jersey number. Both Manning and Tripucka are fine with unretiring the number. And if there were a right way to go about this process, they would be successfully doing so.

Unfortunately, there isn’t.

If Taylor gets one more knuckle on the ball, everything changes. An inch one way or the other and it might be a totally different outcome in the Super Bowl. Afterward, everybody was like, “How did that happen?” But that’s a play we’ve worked on for years. Years.