No One, Especially Roger Goodell, Can Make You Whole Again

The stages of grief are not built the same. The dimensions vary depending on the loss and makeup of the grieving. This is true in sports as it is in real life. There’s no one-size-fits-all program for getting over heartbreak.

With that in mind, most people have treated Saints fans with kid gloves these past 10 days. These poor people had a Super Bowl berth taken away by sheer incompetence and everyone knows it — even the team that benefited and now sits 60 minutes from a championship while New Orleans waits to wake up from a nightmare.

The fanbase’s painful journey toward healing has come in many steps, most entirely nonconstructive. There was false hope that an obscure rule could lead to a replay. There were demands for a public apology. There was whatever the hell this enormous waste of Congressional time and energy is or was trying to be. And there were conspiracy theories built on the premise of a Southern California sleeper cell coming to life at just the right time to bring one home for the Rams. Oh yeah, and making death threats.

The din grew to such a crescendo that we have New York Times columnists wondering if the NFL has become a safe haven for those who want to completely ignore reality.

What Saints wanted most was to hear from Roger Goodell, since they couldn’t get their first choice of getting his head on a stake. As head of the NFL, the buck stops with him. Surely hearing that a travesty of justice took place would make them whole again. Today was to be the big day. Answers would be ascertained. Heads might roll. Pain would be alleviated.

Here’s the reality, and it won’t make anyone in Louisiana feel any better.

Goodell can’t do that. Nothing can do that. That’s an internal thing.

It sucks to hear that. I get it. But nothing Goodell could have walked to the podium during his press conference and said would have fixed that broken heart. Here’s how the commissioner handled things.

What more, realistically, could a person expect from Goodell? He’s not in the business of throwing people under buses or giving oxygen to a sideshow that is threatening to engulf the actual Super Bowl. He is, however, trained in the ways of a politician.

Not only did he acknowledge the pain, he left the door open to expanding video in the future. He repeatedly drilled down on the human element of sports.

This is always what Saints fans were going to get. Part of processing the NFC Championship loss was the realization, hopefully, that nothing could ever make it right. There’s really no Band-Aid for this type of stuff.

Ask St. Louis Cardinals fans about Don Denkinger. Or Miami Hurricanes fans about the late pass interference flag against Ohio State. These things can’t be erased. Not even by future championships (which may never come). Patriots fans are still railing about Deflategate — a problem of their own making — after years and years of success.

New rules about replaying pass interference calls or coach super challenges won’t change what happened. This is not an episode of Lost. Jack and Kate and Sawyer can’t make everything right.

This is not meant to be harsh. But the folly of looking to Goodell, the NFL, or other misery-stricken fans for recovery — to feel whole again — is a fool’s errand. That takes time and some internal mental fortitude.

No one’s expecting you to be over it right now. Eventually, it will get better. Bearable even. You’ll feel close to whole again, but there’s a part that is lost forever.

Acceptance is the first step.