Remember when football was football? Remember when football weather was anything but 72 degrees in a climate-controlled environment, and when rain poured down onto a dirt field, and bent facemasks covered broken-nosed, blue-collard men?

Men who, without the game of football, would otherwise be working 12-hour shifts in a steel mill or collecting overtime demoing brick buildings. Football was rough. It was physical. It didn’t apologize for its physicality.

And we loved it.

Now, we have had a game cancelled due to “GUMMY PAINT”!  No, I am serious … A game honoring former NFL iron man Brett Favre, as well as a Raider quarterback with the nickname of “Snake,” was cancelled due to field conditions caused by, yes, Gummy Paint.

The Green Bay Packers and Indianapolis Colts, two teams drenched in football folklore, were thwarted by paint. Two teams, with storied traditions of playing in the most vicious of environments, could not toss around the pigskin because some groundskeeper used the wrong brand of paint.

In Green Bay, some of Lambeau’s most-iconic moments have come on what amounts to no more than painted, frozen dirt. And while the Colts have a fancy dome stadium now, for many years they played on concrete, covered by an unforgiving green carpet.

But on Sunday August 7, 2016, those two iconic teams met to play an exhibition game in Canton, Ohio, and that exhibition game was cancelled. Cancelled because the paint used on the field congealed and turned “gummy.”

Football used to carry with it a badge of honor, a badge that read, “I am tough, I am an athlete and I do what you cannot.”

But now football is money; football, and more specifically the NFL, is a business.

And in business, you must protect the asset and secure the investment, even if that means turning away fans who flew to Canton, Ohio to watch an exhibition game. The NFL and its teams must protect the dollars to be made on a later date. And while that mindset is something most of us can all understand, it certainly isn’t something we enjoy.

We all know that football is under attack, and we know that the game of football will look drastically different in the future. If we are to have football at all, safety must be a top priority.

What we did not know is that the most dangerous attack might come from within. It might come from football itself, the NFL, where Gummy Paint and advertising dollars not lost are now a reason to cancel tradition and turn fans away.