JIM GERAGHTY: NFL Shaken by Damar Hamlin Collapse.

A few folks have wondered if, once Hamlin’s condition has stabilized and we know he’ll be okay, the game can be continued or replayed, and if so, how. There is just one more week in the regular season, and both the Bills and Bengals have already qualified for the playoffs. In the early morning hours, the Bills players and staff returned to Buffalo; they’re going to need, at minimum, a couple of days before they can refocus on football. The playoffs are scheduled to start on Saturday, January 14. Right now, it seems likely that 30 of the NFL’s 32 teams will play a 17-game schedule, and the Bills and Bengals will play only 16 games, and that awkward imbalance will have to do. Put an asterisk in the record books, and chalk it up to extraordinary and unavoidable circumstances.

Last night also brought a lot of the idiotic usual suspects out of the woodwork to contend that Hamlin’s collapse had nothing to do with the impact to the chest he had suffered moments earlier and was some sort of delayed — I guess really delayed — serious reaction to the Covid-19 vaccine.

At some point, those who speculate that every health problem of every celebrity or public figure is a reaction to a Covid vaccine whose supposed dangers the whole wide world is covering up will become akin to those who attribute all world events to aliens or lizard people. As the saying goes, you can’t reason a man out of a position he didn’t reason himself into. These people will use words such as “medical evidence,” but they’re clearly not interested in that. They choose to live in an alternate world of dark conspiracies, shadowy secrets, brainwashed “sheeple,” and themselves: the bold, rebellious heroes of their own narrative. It is a faith-based argument meant for a faith-based audience.

Speaking of faith-based, I can’t help but notice that modern America is a secular society, with more than a little sneering and eye-rolling at organized religion.

And then something like this happens, and the word “pray” comes out of so many mouths.

ESPN hosts as they tap danced and improvised before the game was officially cancelled by the ozone layer of NFL management were a grim spectacle. The same leftists who get the vapors over the phrase “thoughts and prayers” after a violent act in America were certainly offering a lot of them last night.