What will Tim Tebow be doing by the time you read this? Will he be leading the Jets to an improbable victory, perhaps even a miraculous playoff berth? Will he be publicly demanding a trade to somewhere like Jacksonville? Or will he be exactly where he was when we last saw him — injured and wasting away on the Jets’ bench, weathering nasty cheap shots from teammates, like the one who sneered to The Daily News: “We’re depending on miracles? You can’t play that way”?

His future in New York seems more tenuous than ever. Rex Ryan wouldn’t play him during the Thanksgiving Day massacre — a game so hellacious it generated its own series of Internet memes, several revolving around Mark Sanchez’s collision with a teammate’s posterior. In the following game against Arizona, when the Jets finally benched Sanchez, Tebow was out with fractured ribs, and it was Greg McElroy, the third-stringer, who stepped in to provide the game-winning heroics. The cosmos has been laying the ironies on thick this season for Jets fans.

I am not a Jets fan, nor am I a Christian, and I’m certainly not a believer in Tim Tebow’s abilities as a quarterback. But I am utterly on the side of the Free Tebow crowd. Tim Tebow proves, if any proof is necessary, that people don’t go to sports events just because they enjoy watching men throw balls and catch balls and hit one another. Stadiums are full of people like me, carrying their hidden fears and struggles to games in the hope of seeing a story unfold that will help them deal with life.

In that light, Tebow has to play again, if not in New York, then somewhere. Not because it would be good for the Jets or good for the fans or good for football, but because of what he has come to represent (to me at least): the necessity, and the beauty, of absurdity. And it all began with a little girl falling down a flight of stairs.