Since Buffalo Bills defensive back Damar Hamlin went into cardiac arrest early in his team’s Jan. 2 game in Cincinnati, there has been a steady stream of thoughtful essays considering the appropriate response to that unsettling incident.

Are we—fans, reporters, the game’s marketers and promoters—all “complicit in the NFL’s violence” by contributing to the sport’s massive popularity?—New York Times.

Is football “designed to be deadly”?—Salon.

Is it “the ethos of football…to play on” no matter the players’ risk?—The New Yorker.

“Should a civilized culture really be sanctioning” football’s “most inescapable reality show”?—The Atlantic.

All reasonable questions, and there will be no good answers here, though I have dealt with a handful of incidents in a half-century of working as a sports journalist that could have triggered similar contemplations.

I happened to be covering a 2010 college game in which a player was paralyzed by a kickoff collision. I was asked to interview the father, brother and associates of Darryl Stingley one year after Stingley famously was left a paraplegic during a 1978 NFL exhibition game. I have reported on the increasingly common evidence of the degenerative brain disease CTE, chronic traumatic encephalopathy, found in deceased former players, and have spoken to forensic neuropathologist Bennet Omalu who, in a 2002 autopsy of former Pittsburgh Steeler Mike Webster, first recognized CTE in a football player.

What made the Hamlin episode different, and instantly more terrifying, was that it appeared after a typical play-ending tackle, didn’t result from one of those crippling head blows, yet brought medical personnel racing onto the field to administer CPR. Everything—fellow players, officials, spectators—stood eerily still even after Hamlin was carted away in an ambulance 10 minutes later. Almost as hour passed before the game was postponed, with Hamlin said to be in critical condition at a local hospital.

So, about those earlier questions: New York Magazine’s Will Leitch found “progress” in the league’s decision to stop play, citing the opposite decision minutes after Chuck Hughes of the Detroit Lions, the only NFL player to die on the field, collapsed with a heart attack during a 1971 game.

Such standard procedure to play on applied in ’78, when a vicious blow from Oakland’s Jack Tatum levelled New England star receiver Stingley, putting him in a wheelchair for life (he died on 2007), but didn’t stop the game. And, in 2010 at the New Jersey Meadowlands, as soon as Rutgers University lineman Eric LeGrand was carried off the field on a stretcher—he attempted to give a thumbs-up but had no feeling below the neck—action against Army resumed.

And somehow these sobering moments didn’t put a dint in attraction to the sport—for fans, officials, teammates and the gravely injured players themselves. In Rutgers’ victorious but glum locker room after that 2010 Army game, LeGrand’s teammates acknowledged, in the words of linebacker Antonio Lowery, how it was “hard going back out there after [seeing LeGrand motionless on the field]. Everybody had watered eyes. It’s hard. Violent game.”

Yet he added, “It’s what I do. I love it to death. [Such an injury] is one of those things you have to deal with.”

In my 1979 interview with Stingley’s father and brother, both of whom were former football players at a lower level, there was happy reminiscing recalled from a recent Father’s Day gathering. No regrets, his brother Wayne recalled, only that “Darryl said, ‘Hey, I gave it my all and it took something from me.’ That’s what he said. ‘I gave it my all and it took something from me.’”

Chris Nowinski, a former Harvard player who is a behavioral neuroscientist and founding CEO of the nonprofit Concussion Legacy Foundation that studies CTE, cautioned in a New York Times essay that as alarming as Hamlin’s injury was, it was “focusing attention on a single, dramatic outlier rather than the chronic medical conditions that pose by far the greatest danger to players.”

Nowinski cited chronic heart disease and the long-term effects of traumatic brain injuries for robbing “countless players of their health, their happiness and even their lives but do not receive the same medical or cultural attention because they happen away from the cameras.” He ticked off the names and ages of nine former players who died of heart disease between 26 and 46 years old since 2015.

Of course, the good news is that Hamlin, who is only 24, is in the midst of a remarkable recovery and there even has been speculation whether he might ever play football again. But here’s another question with no answer: Should he?