Lyle Cain had sweated through everything he owned.
His hands, in fact, were so sweaty that Alabama’s team doctor was having trouble doing his job, which, at the time, was to slip DeVonta Smith’s dislocated right index finger back into its joint. Cain’s hands were wet enough that he needed gloves, but in this small, stuffy, inflatable medical tent erected on the Crimson Tide’s sideline, there existed only one pair of gloves—the ones Smith wore to catch 12 passes for 215 yards and three touchdowns in the first half of the national championship game.