Athletes, dying young

 I don't know if Dwayne Haskins ever would have fulfilled the promise of his one glittering autumn at Ohio State. I don't know if his coming season with the Pittsburgh Steelers would have been his great awakening, or if he would have been destined never to have one.

All I know is what happened to him at just past 6:30 yesterday morning.

That's when he decided to cross a busy highway, and was hit by a dump truck.

I don't know if he saw the truck. I don't know why he decided to cross the highway at that precise moment. All I know, again, is now we'll never know. 

That's because the truck hit him and he died and it's all so senseless, stupid, unjust in a way human beings have a hard time getting their heads around. Dwayne Haskins was just 24 years old, for one thing. By all accounts he was an upbeat, outgoing young man who instilled positivity in everyone around him -- so much so that even the coach of the team that cut him, Ron Rivera of the Washington Commanders, issued a public statement full of anguish.

Getting hit by a truck is not supposed to be how it ends for young men like that.

And, yes, you can say that's not how it's supposed to end for anyone, young or old.  You can say no 24-year-old, whether they're good at throwing a football or not, deserves to die by getting hit by a truck or, too often, by a bullet.

You can say it's all senseless and stupid and unjust. And of course you'd be right.

But there is something about athletes dying young, as A.E. Housman tried to tell us. There is something about the good ones, like Dwayne Haskins, that convinces us they're immune to the everyday shocks that afflict the rest of us mortals.

It's absurd, obviously. They're as susceptible to those shocks as anyone, and they've proved it time and time and time again. You could even maintain they fall prey to human frailty even more often -- or at least more publicly.

But somehow, because they do things in the arena we could never do, it doesn't seem so. It's an illusion, but it's also part of why we watch them. It's part of why we probably always will.

And why it will always feel so wrong when one of them falls.