HOUSTON—At the beginning of Super Bowl week Atlanta Falcons receiver Mohamed Sanu was asked about America’s recent Muslim ban, because, as he put it, “my name’s Mohamed. A lot of people know I’m a Muslim.” Here is what he said.

“It’s a very tough situation,” he said. “I just pray that us as a country and a world can be united. It’s really hard for me to talk about this right now. It would take a lot of time. I would really like to just focus on the game and just talk about football.”

He didn’t say he didn’t have an opinion. He didn’t say he was singularly focused on football. He said it would take a lot of time to unpack his thoughts, too much time. He wanted to do the easier thing instead.

If anything spoke for this Super Bowl week, it was that. If you pay attention to the news there is a fire every day, a flood every day, a feeling of something historic and terrifying, and a lot of people are struggling with it. The Super Bowl is still the Super Bowl: Drew Brees still talks about Chunky Soup on the NFL Network before J.J. Watt plugs Bose headphones, and the parties and TV sets and radio tables and tourist zones are all here. It’s all still happening.

But the real world keeps wedging itself in. So many sportswriter conversations here haven’t been about sports.

“I think everyone still feels weird, and will for a while,” says Steve Politi of the Newark Star-Ledger, “but that ultimately people still like sports.”

Probably true. Take PFT Commenter. He is a satirist/comedian/performance artist for Barstool Sports, a bro-collective that does not take things seriously. He snuck into Opening Night and got close enough to Tom Brady to ask a question, which was: Is the reason you and Bill Belichick are for Trump is you think you might be able to get back Robert Kraft’s Super Bowl ring? PFT also spent the week buying a handgun while posing as a Canadian — complete with notes from his fictional parents, which the gun store didn’t care about — running into Guy Fieri at a party, and getting punched in the crotch on Comedy Central. This is his job, and he is good at it.

But coming into Super Bowl week, even he had his doubts. He was paying more and more attention to the news, and on the Saturday before he came to Houston, as protests swept across the United States in response to the ban, he got a little existential.

“Not that it was total doubt, but more that the mood in the United States is so centred in fear, hate and outrage that it’s tough for people to feel that laughter is appropriate,” he said. “It’s been building for a month or so, but Saturday was a tipping point.”

He still came to Houston and did the work because he loves making people laugh, and probably needed that himself. This week has been a relief, because he’s mostly too busy with frivolity to check his phone.

“But every time I check the news it seems like there’s another complete disaster,” says PFT. “You could tell me that there has been an executive order for mandatory military service for men aged 18 to 22, or a burgeoning land war with Belize, and I’d probably believe you.”

The editor of the conservative site The Federalist, Benjamin Domenech, wrote a piece for the New York Times wishing that the Super Bowl could be separate from politics, in an era where it feels like nothing is. The Times also noticed that every question from Opening Night that referenced politics or President Donald Trump had been excised from the blizzard of official NFL transcripts.

It was still everywhere. The commissioner, Roger Goodell, refused to take a stance on the refugee ban beyond: watch the game on Sunday; the president of the player’s union, Eric Winston, said “Our Muslim brothers that are in this league, we have their backs . . . I’ll go stand with them . . . Not to get too broadly into this, but we’re starting to turn away from our values as a country.” Even the normally apolitical Seattle quarterback Russell Wilson said of the Trump presidency this past week, “It’s already too much. It’s already crazy. It’s already affecting people’s hearts and souls and lives in such a negative way . . . if we’re going to be a nation that says we’re equal, we have to be equal.”

Oh, and Vice-President Mike Pence will be at the game. Trump will be interviewed on Fox as part of the pre-game show.

On Saturday an anti-Trump, pro-refugee protest threaded from city hall to the Super Bowl celebrations, before being stopped by police. It looked a lot like the protests at airports and in cities across the country. Here, it felt like a collision between two versions of America. I don’t know. Sometimes it’s hard to stick to sports.

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“I’ve never felt sports should be treated as anything more than a diversion,” says Jason Gay of the Wall Street Journal. “It can be meaningful and very fun, but I find it silly and overwrought when people treat sports with overt seriousness. It may be true that the current news environment and dialogue puts sports into perspective, but ordinary life should put sports into perspective. It’s sports.”

Sports has always tried to be its own distinct kingdom, but these days politics has become the water that swamps every boat. On Sunday a lot of people will watch and remember that New England’s most important figures are linked to Trump, and see that Atlanta has a Muslim wide receiver. And it’ll be one of the biggest games in the world.

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