Turn your heads if it helps. Put your hands over your ears and sing loudly to drown out the noise. Yell at anyone who raises the subject.

But it's still there. Football is beginning to scare the hell out of football players, and at some point, it's going to have to start scaring the hell out of you.

As evidence slowly but surely grows from scientists and studies, even one commissioned by the NFL, that the game itself at nearly every level is bad for the human brain, you're going to have to come to grips with the notion that your favorite sport is not that much different than boxing - a guilty pleasure.

The most disturbing tale of all, perhaps, was a submission from Michael Oriard, the 61-year-old former Kansas City Chiefs offensive lineman and now an associate dean of English at Oregon State, who wrote a Deadspin.com piece Friday admitting that he essentially has been replaying his entire career, play by play, to try to find the moment he might have started the road to early-onset dementia, or worse.

Telling quotes follow.

"I've been reading these reports less as someone who has been writing about football for many years than as someone, 61 years old, who played a lot of football a long time ago, and as the father of a son who has played more recently. The research on the later consequences of early head trauma raises the possibility that my son and I, too, might have tiny bombs planted in our brains with fuses of indeterminate length."

And:

"As a father, rather than a former player, the research suggesting that football can do long-term damage to even high school players is particularly chilling. My younger son, who played football, proved to be susceptible to concussions, getting more or less one per season from about the sixth grade through high school. Lots of parents know the routine: I would awaken him every few hours through the night to ask him his address and phone number, then let him fall back asleep after he delivered the correct answer. Fortunately, he never played for a coach who tried to get him back onto the field before our doctor had cleared him. His mother and I are not obsessing about the possibilities of long-term effects, but given parents' unlimited capacity to worry about our children, that would change the moment he started complaining about headaches."

And:

"I feel enormous sadness for teammates and other former NFL players who are not as fortunate as I still appear to be. And the future of football seems uncertain right now. The Congressional hearing on brain damage to NFL players will not resolve the crucial questions about just how dangerous football is. For now, parents have more reasons than ever to be wary of letting their sons play football."

Oriard is not an anti-football crusader, either. He is a reasonable person who sees football's benefits as well as its dangers. He has no axes to grind about his NFL pension, as he didn't play enough to get one. He wants us all to wrestle with this as he is wrestling with it, and he wants us not to dismiss it as merely some knee-jerk, anti-fun reaction to a couple of academic papers. He wants us to take our brains, and those of our children seriously, and that means asking bedrock questions about our national sport and our roles in it.

He has no answers. We have no answers. But we now have questions, from the Pop Warner coach who might not know his craft as well as he should, to the athletic trainers who will spend more of their working lives wrestling with this, and all the way to the man who leads the largest and most successful sporting organization in the nation. Again, Oriard:

"We need much more research - on large number of former players, over a long period of time - to know just how dangerous football is to the human brain. Knowing the answer might be a blow not only to the NFL but to all lovers of football. But continuing to not know might be considerably more painful for those who play the game. And the NFL has to worry not only about potential liability for the disabilities of former players, but also about the game's future. One of Roger Goodell's worst nightmares has to be the possibility that football will come to be regarded as boxing is today: a potential and very violent path to celebrity and wealth that only the most economically desperate would consider and that the vast majority of Americans find unpalatable."

In the meantime, there are 13 NFL, two UFL, four CFL, 206 college and thousands of high school games that have or will be played this weekend. Some of those players, coaches, administrators and fans will be thinking, perhaps, about Oriard's words. If not, they can't say they weren't told.