Broken

They booed him when he walked off his last football field Saturday night, and what a fine thanks for services rendered that was. Andrew Luck left pieces of himself scattered from San Diego to Foxborough for all those jamokes in their throwback Peyton and Marvin and Bob Sanders jerseys, and their gold watch to him was to boo him like he was Deflategate Brady.

"Yeah, it hurt," Luck admitted later, eyes red, tears close, a 29-year-old man in a 55-year-old's body.

Darned right it hurt. But maybe it was affirmation, too, that walking away was the right thing at the right time for a man who always had more going on between his ears than snap counts and checkdowns, and who loved with a child's fervor a game that, in the end, didn't love him back.

Those dillsacks that booed him last night, every one of whom should have been tossed out of the joint like 2 a.m. drunks?

They weren't as hard on Andrew Luck as the game was, ultimately. Or as his own front office was.

It was the latter that most ruined him, of course, by drafting like drunks themselves. With almost unimaginable good fortune, they fell into a generational talent just as the generational talent they already had (Peyton Manning) was making for sunset. Then they put him behind a remainder-bin offensive line that couldn't block sunlight, and broke him the way a careless child breaks a toy.

Luck was hit, and hit, and hit again, even as he led the Colts back to semi-respectability. And the injuries soon followed.

Torn rib cartilage.

Torn abdomen.

Concussion.

Lacerated kidney that left him pissing blood.

The torn labrum in his throwing arm that refused to heal and put him down for the entire 2017 season.

And then ...

And then, the strained calf back in March. More pain. More pain. A month became two became six and still no one, least of all Luck himself, could figure out why he was still in pain, still couldn't move properly in the pocket.

Enough was finally enough.

And, listen, if what happened last night left most of the football world reeling, it was not something that came winging in from the blue. As long ago as 2017, when the shoulder simply wouldn't heal, Luck says he contemplated hanging it up. And he'd been mulling the same thing for two weeks before last night, and the Colts knew it. So he did not just spring this on his employers, and it wasn't a decision he arrived at on the spur of the moment.

In the end, it wasn't even his decision, in a sense. There comes a time when the body simply tells the mind, "No more." And the mind, no matter how sheathed it is in steel, has to go along.

This is what Luck seemed to be describing last night, and to hell with anyone who thinks badly of him for it. The jamokes and the clueless will scoff when Luck talks about how the pain had stolen the joy of the game for him, pointing out that he gets paid absurdly well to do a job and that joy doesn't enter into it.

But it does. And it should.

The money, see, is irrelevant, because playing professional football is a hard dollar no matter how high the dollars are stacked. It's why more and more players are walking away from the game in their 20s, or at the gateway of their 30s. No contract, after all, is juicy enough to give you back what football, by its very nature, takes away.

I have never stood on an NFL sideline during a game. But I have stood on the sideline at Notre Dame Stadium, many times, and I've heard what it sounds like when two high-end college football players collide at full speed.

It sounds like two cars colliding. You can't imagine the violence of it.

And that's not even the NFL, where the violence is ratcheted up even higher.

And so, players get out while the getting's good. And Andrew Luck is getting out while he can still walk, still get down on the floor and play with his kids when they come, go to their ballgames when they get older and remember being there.

Yeah, the timing sucks, if you're a Colts fan. But if you're Colts fan, your opinion matters exactly zero here, because it's not your life.

Or your pain. Or your vanished joy.