Real men don’t ask hypothetical questions.

Ricky Williams is easy to criticize. He’s also hard to condemn. In an on-again, off-again NFL career, the Miami Dolphins running back has succeeded in nothing so much as tumbling short of expectations—which would be worse news if tumbling short of expectations weren’t such a wholly human pastime.

Potential chases the illusion of tomorrow.

Disappointment, on the other hand, faces the truth of today.

I’m not suggesting that Williams was fated to flop in the pros. There’s a fine line between social anxiety and self-indulgence, and Ricky’s psychological struggles have undoubtedly been compounded by a failure of will. But then again all wills fail against the determinism of the past. In a league where nothing can change after the last whistle, the only meaningful postgame analysis is that which accounts for the final score.

You can’t unspill your milk.

You can’t unsquander your talent.

If there’s a lesson in the Williams saga, it’s simply that there’s no use crying over what tears won’t fix.

Football fans love to wonder “What if?” Coulda, woulda, shoulda—it’s a vocabulary of speculative nostalgia, language fit for remembering things that never were. The catch, of course, is that the center doesn’t snap the ball in the subjunctive tense. Draft experts will argue that Williams had as much upside as any prospect in history. I’d counter that upside only exists in an eternally ahistorical future.

It’s good to be gifted.

It’s better to be grounded.

Williams may not lead your team to a Fantasy championship, but at least his example shines a clarifying light on factual defeat.

Ours is the best and worst of all possible worlds. An option becomes a mandate as soon as it’s selected; an outcome becomes inevitable the moment it arrives. What might have been for Ricky Williams is beside the point, because no veteran role player can be any more or less than what he has to be. Every hero sets out in pursuit of the goal line. The one who stumbles at midfield can’t but choose to find peace in the essence of the grass.

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Job never violated his employer's marijuana policy, but he did know how to be mellow under fire :

Naked I came from my mother's womb,
and naked I will depart.
The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away;
may the name of the Lord be praised.

Which is a sensible creed for any mere mortal.

Because grace and glory are equally fleeting, and anyone who laments the loss too loudly is either jonesing for his first post-retirement joint or only just saying, is all...