Delayed entrance

Eight men will don the yellow jacket this weekend in Canton, Ohio, although not really, because one of them will be in Tennessee for some inexplicable reason, although not really because it's Terrell Owens and we all know how that guy is.

In other words, the Pro Football Hall of Fame inducts the class of 2018 on Saturday.

This is always a highlight of the NFL season, and not because of the Hall of Fame game, which annually pits two teams of schmucks who are about to be cut. It's a highlight because an entire century shows up in Canton that weekend, and you can literally sit in the hotel lobby and watch it parade (or limp, usually) past you.

Once upon a time I went to Canton for that weekend, to cover Fort Wayne native Rod Woodson's induction. It was a great weekend. When I checked into the hotel, Fred Biletnikoff was standing right behind me. Mel Renfro hobbled past, leaning on a cane. The great defensive end of the Lombardi Packers, Willie Davis, made his way gingerly through the lobby. It was living history, the glory and ruin of pro football all wrapped up in one bittersweet package.

Speaking of which, one of the eight men who goes in this weekend is Jerry Kramer.

That he should have had his Canton moment decades ago is so patently obvious it scarcely needs mentioning, but the Blob will mention it anyway. Kramer was, after all, one of the linchpins of those aforementioned Lombardi Packers, the dominant team of the decade (the 1960s) when professional football first became an American obsession.

He was the pulling guard who led Paul Hornung and Jim Taylor on all those fabled Packer sweeps. He (along with center Ken Bowman) made the most famous block in NFL history, plowing aside Jethro Pugh in the walk-in freezer of Lambeau Field so Bart Starr could squeeze through for the winning touchdown in the Ice Bowl. And he was the guy who gave us all a peek inside with his diary of that season, "Instant Replay," which not only demystified the game but made it accessible to the average fan -- whose attachment to it is now total in a way no one from Kramer's generation could possibly have envisioned.

In short, Jerry Kramer was the best O-lineman on an iconic team that lived off its O-linemen like few others, and that more than any other team sent the NFL out into the wider world it so completely inhabits today. And yet for years, he was the guy in the waiting room paging through all those 2-year-old magazines over and over, watching Regis and Kathie Lee and wondering when the hell they were going to come get him.

Well. This weekend, they'll finally come and get him. And a glaring hole in Canton at last will be filled.

Applause, applause.