Colin Kaepernick rolled into Super Bowl XLVII in late January 2013 as the NFL's hottest new phenomenon. He enjoyed a week of media adulation, came within a few goal-line stops of winning the Super Bowl and left New Orleans looking like the new face of American sports superstardom: successful, marketable and almost completely uncontroversial.
Just five long winters have passed since then. You may still have socks in your drawer which you wore in that simpler era before Fake News and the white nationalist "alt-right" movement, the fairytale time when the quest for social progress didn't feel like a rearguard action and the NFL finally appeared to be ready to move beyond its hang-ups about black quarterbacks.