I have been threatening to break up with a bad girlfriend for years.

She takes more than she gives, hurts people with impunity and has little empathy for those she maims or kills. Our years together have been thrilling. Once our relationship is finally over I am sure I will pine for her and be disturbed when I see other men enjoying her.

So this is it: I am breaking up with the NFL.

We should not celebrate the miraculous recovery of Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin this past week. We must not allow the terror of those 10 minutes after his injury to vanish from our memories instantaneously as is the American custom. I was working when it all unfolded on television. Speaking as a nurse, I can tell you that healthcare professionals would rather have a hot needle jammed into both eyes than to have people watch them do CPR. It is always traumatic and frequently does not end well.

When those trainers and doctors immediately began to do CPR on three television networks in front of 25 million witnesses, I knew that the young man was in serious trouble. Everyone was frozen in the moment. Monday Night clash of AFC heavyweights? Forgotten. The preservation of Hamlin’s life was our singular concern. Remember how you felt as he lay there motionless and dangling over the abyss?

This 24-year-old life became our collective most prized possession.

Now I want you to remember how it felt when you heard them announce that the game would resume after a brief warm up. At first, I was puzzled. There has to be a mistake. I just watched a mother climb into an ambulance with her unresponsive son. How could anyone be so tone deaf to her pain and to our shock? It became obvious there would be no game.

Nevertheless …

That was when I decided. NFL … your greedy ass has to go.

One did not arrive at this conclusion lightly. I fell in love with the NFL a long time ago, 1976 to be exact. My mother took my two brothers and I to buy those old NFL coats with the team colors and the sweet logo patch. They only had one coat in “husky.”

That is ’70s speak for fat. I used to get called “portly” back then as well. That also means fat.

I left clad in the purple and gold of the Minnesota Vikings. They became mine that day and I became theirs. That year the Vikings battled their way to a humiliating defeat at the hands of John Madden and the Oakland Raiders in the Super Bowl. I have been chasing a trip back to the Big Game ever since like an addict trying to recreate that first high. The NFL became my girlfriend. She got my time, my money and my love.

Forty-six years have passed and I have remained faithful. If I could harness the energy and emotion I have spent by being ensorcelled by pro football we could eliminate fossil fuels. I found NFL games wildly entertaining. In spite of the Vikings legacy of mediocrity and incompetence, I stood by them for years just like some of you stand by the Bears.

But why?

I have been trying to answer that question in the weeks since the Hamlin injury. The best I could come up with for myself is that pro football allows people to vicariously kick butt. For three hours you become the hunter instead of the hunted. The only description for the feeling I used to get when John Randle would rip through the line and grab the quarterback like the last chicken wing is euphoria.

We all go to our lousy jobs all week and suffer the indignities of that life. Samantha burns the microwave popcorn every day and stinks up the office. The boss is a jerk. You constantly have to do more with less. And speaking of smells, your coworker Jane has come down with ulcerative colitis.

You have started calling her “Jane the Ripper.”

I risked life and limb driving to Minneapolis during winter to see my girlfriend more times than I can count because of the ways she simply thrilled me. I was in the Metrodome when Bears quarterback Jim Harbaugh chucked the interception that fueled a Vikings comeback from a 20-0, fourth-quarter deficit. That feeling, as if the building would crumble like the walls of Jericho beneath the roar is among the biggest thrills of my lifetime.

For years and years we never knew the price players paid for our entertainment.

Chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) and its record of destroying the lives of veteran NFL players is now well known. We were all shocked to learn that Aaron Hernandez was a three-time murderer, that Lawrence Phillips died in prison, that Junior Seau killed himself and so did Dave Duerson. These are the fossils that fuel the fire where those thrills are forged. These are only the ones. The only ones we know about, that is.

Consider the case of Antonio Brown, who was formerly an All-Pro wideout with the Pittsburgh Steelers. His life has been a spectacular train wreck over the past three or four years. We have witnessed inexplicable and erratic behavior from Brown. He has squandered opportunities and made mind boggling choices.

No one seems to recall the incredibly violent and dirty shot he took to the head from a Cincinnati linebacker named Vontaze Burfict. Do take a moment to Google it. That instant likely stripped Brown of the ability to reason like an adult and moderate his behavior. Think of all the “off the reservation” behaviors from NFL players over the years.

Plaxico Burress shoots himself by accident. Chris Henry is thrown from the bed of a pickup truck and dragged to his death. Rae Carruth hires Buckwheat and Stymie from Our Gang to murder his pregnant girlfriend and is later captured hiding in the damn trunk of a car. Ray Rice slugs his fiancee in the face so hard we all felt it. And so on and so on.

Beneath the glorious roar of victory in those huge cathedrals to violence are the moans of the bent and broken men the NFL refuses to provide with the means to live normal lives subsequent to their playing careers. Bent and broken men break wives, daughters and sons. The damage is generational and exponential. The NFL continues to lengthen the regular season and expand the playoffs.

It is possible that I may take my girlfriend back. She has been my favorite drug for a long while and she really is beautiful as long as she can keep all her ugly on the inside.