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.

This is the same president who said, after Bin Laden was dead, that we shouldn’t ‘spike the ball’ after the touchdown,” Mr. McCain said in a statement Friday. “And now Barack Obama is not only trying to score political points by invoking Osama bin Laden, he is doing a shameless end zone dance to help himself get re-elected.

NOW suggests the donair is “similar” to a Greektown gyro. This, in and of itself, would not be so offensive – even if the only thing the two dishes share is the fact they come wrapped in a pita and are carved from a mysterious meat log.

But the magazine goes further. It suggests that donair sauce, the very nectar of the gods, is “sometimes gag-inducing.” Such an insult cannot go unanswered.

But in the playoffs? In the playoffs the very best effort of an ordinary man can become legend, the sort of thing that makes him a hero in his hometown and a saint in his adopted city. The sort of thing that kids will reenact in street hockey and the local press will show clips of in retrospective montages and when he is old and weak and pays with his credit card in a restaurant the waitress will look at the name and double-take a little, jaw dropped slightly, saying, hey, you’re…!

My wife was in the hospital for over a week, and when someone is gone that long, your mind can start screwing with you, teasing you with the idea that, maybe, they won’t be coming back ever again. I began to fear for my wife’s life, going over all the potential possibilities of what would come home:

1. Wife and kid
2. Wife and no kid
3. Kid and no wife
4. No kid and no wife

White said if it were up to him, the band would still be together. “I’d make a White Stripes record right now. I’d be in the White Stripes for the rest of my life. That band is the most challenging, important, fulfilling thing ever to happen to me. I wish it was still here. It’s something I really, really miss.

Justin Trudeau and Patrick Brazeau are as implicated as their peers in the dishonour of parliamentary behaviour - Trudeau calling Conservative minister Peter Kent a “piece of s**t” in the Commons last fall was a low light in a sea of dim bulbs. The irony then is that it took an honest-togoodness fist fight to bring out the true character in both men. In his victory scrum after the fight Trudeau was almost pitch-perfect in his magnanimity, downplaying the significance of his upset and giving credit to Brazeau for being able to hit “like a Mack truck.” For his part, Brazeau quickly overcame any sense of humiliation and found the right tone of humility and respect.

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.

I view all of modernity with suspicion bordering on paranoia. And my acquaintance with popular culture is so thin that I no longer know who any of the people are in the first-name-only headlines on the gossip tabloids. I used that line in my column three weeks ago, word for word, but I don’t care, because I’m a tired old hack with no standards left, if I ever had any.

Believe me, I’m your guy.

Within seconds he was at my shoulder, complimenting the women at the table, insulting some Daily News reporters across the dining room, and showering my pasta with shavings of truffle, unbidden. It began to grow thick, as snow does on the sidewalk. Some may have fallen on my shoulder. Oh, how he laughed.