We could take the easy and obvious route in praising the way Jalen Hurts handled one of the most devastating public benchings we’ll ever see.

If we want to simply contrast Hurts’ remarkable team-first, team-only reaction to getting Wally Pipped by a freshman named Tua Tagovailoa in Alabama’s epic 26-23 overtime win over Georgia Monday night, we would use the old standby: the disgruntled high-profile athlete.

“Play me or trade me,” the mantra has gone, a refrain of selfishness quoted by too many players to remember, for too many decades to count.

This is the harder question:

How would you have reacted if you were Jalen Hurts, who had only won 26 of his 28 starts as the quarterback of the Alabama Crimson Tide yet at halftime was told to stand down and move aside — and then watched his replacement put on as electrifying a performance as you’ll ever see with a season on the line?

How would I have reacted?

I know the answer to that one, actually: badly. Poorly. I have evidence of this, of course; I suspect we all do at some point. Paul Sabini is one of my dearest friends in life. He is a successful facial plastic surgeon now who also spends time every year doing a pro bono assignment in Third World nations. He’s gotten his two sons involved in that chore of the Lord’s work. He is as good a person as I’ve ever known, as good a friend as I’ll ever have.

Thirty-three years ago, all I wanted was for him to sprain an ankle, or bang up a knee. Or, at the least, play a terrible string of basketball games. He played. I sat. I watched. I stewed. I never said any of this, of course, but you’re damn right I wanted him to blow enough layups for the coach to wave his arms in desperation, point my way, and allow me to come riding to the rescue for the Chaminade Flyers.

Maybe there was a part of Jalen Hurts that wanted the same thing Monday, that wanted the kid from Hawaii to fall on his face so Nick Saban would have little choice but to go back to him. Hell, that was sure how ESPN’s cameras were betting, for all the reaction shots we saw of Hurts. Surely he would crack. Surely he would react.

He did react: by pounding on Tagovailoa’s shouder pads after one touchdown pass, and by hugging him after another. After the game-winner, that magnificent 41-yard touchdown pass to DeVonta Smith that won the game for the Crimson Tide, Hurts ran around deliriously with his teammates, his smile as big as the Mercedes-Benz Dome, his joy evident for the world to see. There was no camouflaging it: The sophomore who got benched was just as ecstatic as the freshman who’d replaced him.

And afterward, it only got better.

“It was important for me to stay true to myself and be the person I am, and be the leader I am, regardless of the circumstance,” Hurts would say, inside a triumphant Alabama dressing room, as euphoria exploded all around him. “It’s my duty to do things like that, and do all those things genuinely.”

Genuine? The kid acted exactly the way you draw it up in the movies — and the way it’s all but impossible to act in real life, with real humans, with real emotions, with real feelings.

Could you have been that gracious?

Could you have even faked it?

“As a competitor, of course you want to stay in there,” he added. “But as a team player, and as a leader, you’ve got to do what’s best for the team. If that was best for the team, then I support it completely.”

Saban is relentlessly praised for the six national championships he has won at LSU and Alabama, and he is vilified for sometimes coming across like a coaching version of Dr. Evil, and there are grains of truth to be gleaned from either characterization, truth be told. But if he can establish the kind of team-first, team-only culture that yields a player like Jalen Hurts, it’s clear he’s doing something right.

And even more obvious that Jalen Hurts is doing something right, too.