What matters

 They worked on the kid for a good 10 minutes, while around them an entire stadium held its breath. Hank Williams Jr. and all his rowdy friends never whooped about THIS on their Monday nights, aw, you bet. No one goes to an NFL game and expects to see CPR On Two, after all.

But that's what happened last night.

With 5:58 to play in the first quarter of a Monday Night Football game between Buffalo and Cincinnati, Bengals wide receiver Tee Higgins caught a pass, turned up field and lowered his shoulder. He hit Bills safety Damar Hamlin square in the chest with it. Both men went down; both men got up. 

Then Hamlin went down again. This tends to happen when your heart stops beating.

Struck at the precise angle and precise millisecond to trigger full cardiac arrest, Hamlin lay there while medical personnel performed CPR on him for what felt like hours. The entire Bills team knelt around him. Players from both the Bills and Bengals were seen openly weeping.

Finally, Hamlin's heart started beating again. They gave him oxygen and loaded him onto an ambulance and took him to the hospital, where he was sedated and intubated and remains in critical condition this morning.

Meanwhile, the ponderous mechanism that is the National Football League creaked and groaned toward a decision that should have taken about two seconds.

An hour after Hamlin was taken off the field -- an hour -- the game finally was postponed.

Credit, first of all, Bengals coach Zac Taylor for recognizing what had to happen. The Bills defense was actually preparing to go back on the field when Taylor crossed over to the Bills side and conferred with Bills coach Sean McDermott, and then with the game officials. After a time everyone left the field and went back to their respective locker rooms to talk it over.

And there they stayed. 

No one was going back on that field, and it didn't matter how long it took Roger Goodell to decide the game would be postponed. The game was postponed from the moment everyone left the field. The coaches and players had already made that decision for the commissioner.

Which, of course, was at once both as it should have been, and a reflection of what happens when stark reality intrudes upon the game's testosterone illusions. The NFL is a world populated by young men at the peak of their physical lives, and if they understand how incredibly violent that world is -- how subjecting themselves to it for even a short period of time can sometimes ruin the rest of their lives -- they also believe in their own invincibility.

Torn ligaments and broken bones and concussions?

Just part of the game, and rub some dirt on it.

A healthy young man suffering cardiac arrest and (essentially) lying dead on the field for minutes?

Hey. Nobody signed up for that.

Life and death had intruded rudely on the NFL's cotton candy world of sanitized, monetized violence, and it's a measure of just what a fantasy all that is that it took the league an hour to understand this (bleep) wasn't normal. And to at last understand what matters in the grand scheme, and to do the human thing.

As for last night's game, who knows how the NFL will work it around to finish the thing. But you know it will, because the Show is all, and must therefore go on.

Whether it's worth caring about right now or not.