What happened to Damar Hamlin this past Monday night jarred us all. We all saw it. We all reacted viscerally. The way he fell. The reaction on the field. Professional football is grown men playing a game. We generally associate games with children. In this vein, the players suddenly looked much younger. Smaller. They looked like scared kids. Some of them were opening weeping. Everything that mattered a few seconds before suddenly didn't matter anymore. It was a shock to all our systems. How quickly things can change. How quickly something we think is vital is rendered irrelevant when placed in its proper context.
We're not used to things happening in real time anymore. We pull them up on our social media feeds after the fact, after they start to trend. After all the amateur pundits have already weighed in and rendered their verdicts.