Today is Superbowl LVII, and despite having been a massive NFL and Miami Dolphins fan for many years, I won’t be watching. The brutality of the sport, and the concussions suffered by my team’s quarterback severed my connection with the NFL, probably forever.

I should probably take a step back at this point, and explain how I, a middle-aged accountant from northern England with no particular connection to Miami, became a Miami Dolphins fan in the first place.

I first took an interest in the sport back in the early Nineties, when one of my friends had a computer game. I think this was long enough ago to even be pre-Madden. I had to select a team to play as, and the Dolphins were one of the better teams (largely down to legendary quarterback Dan Marino, although that didn’t mean anything to me at the time). That was all it took to begin a fandom that lasted over thirty years.

It was hard to maintain an interest at that time. For a while a live game was shown once a week on Channel 4, but in the middle of the night, so I never really watched until my years of teenage insomnia. I would occasionally look up the scores on Ceefax (ask your parents, youngsters) to see how the Dolphins were getting on) and once or twice a year there might be an article in the Sunday paper about the sport, usually for the Super Bowl or if there was some kind of big scandal. Generally the NFL wasn’t a part of my life, especially once I went to University and discovered other pastimes.

In my early Twenties, I made a friend who was a big fan of the New York Jets (a big rival of the Dolphins, although I didn’t realise that then). He talked them me a lot about the specifics of the game that I hadn’t previously understood, flags, formations and franchise tags. My interest was piqued, or re-piqued I guess. What really drew me back in, though was Super Bowl XLII, one of the most dramatic games in history, the underdog New York Giants beating the New England Patriots, who were threatening to take the Dolphins record of being the only team to go through an entire season winning every game.

I started watching the Super Bowl every year, and once I discovered how easy it was to illegally stream games, some of the playoffs too (I was too tight to pay for Sky Sports), and my interest skyrocketed once I entered the world of smartphones. I was suddenly spending a lot more time online, and I discovered blogs and podcasts (most notably from the dearly departed Grantland) that both improved my knowledge of the game and shared my sense of humour about it, drawing me deeper in.

The final piece of the puzzle was NFL Game Pass, which enabled me to watch 40 minute condensed versions of any NFL game at any time. It was perfect for someone who couldn’t (or wouldn’t) most of my Sunday to watching the NFL (as I had a young family), and for a Brit who wasn’t going to stay up into the middle of the night watching live games in a different time zone (I did make it to a few of the NFL UK games, although somehow always managed to miss my Dolphins when they came over).

It seemed that most of my (pretty limited) time to myself was being spent on the NFL, watching and reading and listening, especially, but not only during the season. I did sometimes worry that it was taking up too much of my time, but I also knew I get something valuable from watching sport. It’s hard to define, but certainly different from the pleasures I get from my other hobbies like reading and music. And the NFL was, and is, great sport, combining physically impressive feats with complex chess-like strategy. The NFLs commitment to parity meant it felt that anything could happen from one game or season to the next, and there were fewer dull one-sided games than most sports. Even perennnially hapless teams like the Jets and Jaguars almost made it to the Superbowl during my time watching the NFL, although my Dolphins somehow managed to be mediocre almost every season, finishing between 6-10 and 10-6 and occasionally squeaking into the first round of the playoffs, but no further.

Even during the off season, I was following the draft, free agency, training camps. Sports is very much like a soap opera in that the story never ends and you always want to know what happens next. It was hard to see myself ever breaking out of the NFL cycle, even if I sometimes felt like I wanted to free up more time for other, arguably more enriching pursuits like reading history or writing.

Even at the height of my NFL obsession, there was one nagging issue, always at the back of my mind,and that was brain injuries. More and more evidence was accumulating about the effect of the game on players, in particular CTE, a condition linked to repeated blows to the head, causing depression, memory loss, even violent behaviour.

I tried to justify watching the sport knowing it caused these harms, and the justification was that the players knew the risks involved, earned huge amounts of money, and that steps were being made to reduce the risk. But mainly I just ignored the issue, put it to the back of my mind. Occasionally something would jolt it to the forefront again. The 2012 death of all time great Junior Seau who commited suicide by shooting himself in the chest, so his brain could be studied by medical science. The 2015 retirement of Chris Borland, just one year into his pro career because he didn’t think it was worth the risk of permanent brain damage. In retrospect these should have been enough to break my connection with this cruel sport, but somehow I ignored again and moved on.

I wasn’t sure there would ever be a final straw, but there was, and it came during Miamis week 3 game this season. QB Tua Tagovaiola took a massive hit, and got back up looking disoriented and struggling to stand. It looked as classic a case of concussion as you could see, which under NFL protocols would mean missing the rest of the game and likely some following ones too. Shockingly though, he came back out later on to finish the game.

In the next game Tua, took another massive hit, and left the field again, this time with a definite concussion. Now, as a fan of an NFL team, you’re supposed to always want your star quarterback on the field, to give your team the best chance of winning the game, but I found myself wanting Tua not to come back on, not now not ever. Stay away young man, I thought, protect your brain, no amount of money is worth it.

Once I’d had that thought, that was pretty much it. If you’d rather your teams’ star player wasn’t on the field, it’s over for you as a fan. You can’t watch a sport when you don’t think the players should be there. I quit the NFL right there and then. I stopped watching games, reading articles and listening to podcasts. What had seemed like a cycle I could never break out of, was suddenly incredibly easy to end.

It helps that the NFL is fairly easy to avoid here in the UK. Not that many watch it or talk about it (although a suprising amount of people wear NFL team hats/caps/t-shirts etc.) and there isn’t much media coverage, so there was little to draw me back in.

It’s funny how meaningless it all becomes once you’ve out of it, how strange it seems that it used to matter so much. I compared the NFL to a soap opera earlier, and the occasional headlines I would glimpse while scrolling through news sites (Geno Smith is good now? The Jets aren’t terrible?) felt like stumbling upon a soap you used to watch and being very confused about what’s going on (x is married to y now? So-and-so is dead)?

I did feel a few twinges of interest as we moved towards the end of the season and the play offs, and the coverage in the UK ramped up, but any desire to return to the sport was destroyed by finding out Tua had suffered yet another concussion and of course, the Damar Hamlin incident, where we came very close to a death on the field.

The Hamlin incident prompted a lot of hand-wringing, articles about how the NFL could never come back from this, how it must surely change, but I know it never will. All sports carry some risk of injury, but in some sports the brutality is baked in, like boxing, and, I have to finally admit, the NFL.

Super Bowl night was always one of my favourite nights of the year, staying up ridiculously late with snacks and drinks and enjoying the excitement and spectacle, and cheering on whoever was playing against Tom Brady, but tonight, for the first time in 15 years I’ll be going to bed instead.

I’ll miss it though. I’ll miss the sight of quarterbacks throwing a ball 40 yards into the one spot it can be caught by their teammate, and i’ll miss the spectacular one handed catches. I’ll miss the comebacks and last second field goals. I’ll miss the butt fumbles, the fake punts and the Miami miracles. But I won’t miss them too much, because I finally understand at what cost they came.