I used to look away from the television whenever a player was injured on the field. I told myself it was not part of the game, the clock was not running. I was wrong. The clock is always running. As Saban just said, there is no off-season, and there are no off minutes. So you don’t get to play without acknowledging the harm, the trauma, the burnout. The challenge of keeping on becomes about endurance, and some of the best ways to endure are to compartmentalize the inconvenient, sublimate the pain, and forget the past. All my life I had been trying to right my mindset—had even gotten good at justifying the systems in which I found myself—in order to keep on. But this was a defense, a reflex, a coping mechanism; it was not who I was or who I aspired to be.