Sanity attack

 Damar Hamlin continues to make remarkable progress from his frightening brush with death, awake and alert and communicating through written notes. One of his first was to ask who won the game Monday night, which is all kinds of awesome.

So there's your first victory for today.

Your second?

The National Football League having a rare attack of sanity.

The league announced the Bills-Bengals game postponed after Hamlin's cardiac arrest ll not be finished, which is the only decision it really could have made. Cincy and Buffalo will just have played one fewer game than everyone else, as if anyone will notice or as if it will matter a jot.

It won't. Both teams had already clinched their respective divisions anyway, and if canceling the game means one or the other will get one fewer home game in the playoffs ... well, so what? My aging brain may be admittedly fuzzy in these matters, but I can't recall the last time you could definitively say home field advantage actually was a real factor in the NFL postseason.

You could, in fact, argue that it has less an impact on the outcome than in any other sport. Remember that year it was colder than a well-digger's heinie in Green Bay and everyone thought the Giants would just curl up and die? Or how about the 49ers coming into frozen tundra country last year?

The Giants  won. The Niners won (a week after beating Dallas in Dallas). And since we're talking about the Bengals here, how about having to go to both Tennessee and Kansas City?

That was last year, too, and, hey, look at this: The Bengals won in Nashville. Then they won the AFC title game in Arrowhead, one of the most intimidating home fields in the league.

So, yeah. Tell me how crucial it would have been to scramble the entire schedule just to give someone an extra home game.

Instead, the show will go on, because corporate monoliths as massive as the NFL tend to create their own inertia. Near-death events can't stop them. Inconvenient circumstances arising from those near-death events can't stop them. Hell, not even New Year's Day could stop the NFL from the swift completion of its appointed rounds.

Sportsball World just moved New Year's Day to January 2.

Damar Hamlin almost died that day. 

Six days later, the monolith will just keep grinding along. It's what monoliths do.