Amid the chaos of last year, a time when football was of paltry importance in the grand scheme of things and a healthy doubt about a functioning season existed, there were plenty of budding story lines related to what was happening on the field that we didn’t have the headspace to grasp.
There we were in mid-August, barreling down on Week 1, when we’d be hit with topics that would have been so thoroughly dissected during a normal offseason that they would begin to feel trite before kickoff. Instead, we rubbed our eyes and said, My goodness, that’s right, Cam Newton is on the Patriots now.