Hundreds more will be there in spirit only — the imprisoned Jan. 6 “patriots” — awaiting their release from jail with the stroke of a proverbial pen, the minute this gala becomes official. Their presence would have swelled the numbers even more bigly.

But one vital character in the unfinished opus that is the life of Donald J. Trump will not be attending — the long-time dead Roy Marcus Cohn.

It’s not an incredible stretch to conjure Roy on the steps of the Capitol. If AIDS hadn’t claimed him at 59, terminating his very close relationship with our 47th president, he’d be 97 for this history-making day. Clint Eastwood and Warren Buffett still thrive, close to that number. Queen Elizabeth fell one short of it. Trump’s fellow TV legend, Norman Lear, made 101. The spry and venerable Dick Van Dyke just turned 99, but — unlike Roy — is more intent on stomping fires than starting them.

One could imagine gene-pool winning Trump — diagnosed as the “fittest president ever” — a sureshot to be with us into his 90s — with Roy, still frolicking and scheming and lunching, making America great. It’s an out price these two would still share a very close relationship, if Roy hadn’t upped and died.

VIP sections will be full, led by the family section and the aggrieved first lady, still bitter at FBI agents for rifling through her underwear drawer, but apparently merciful enough toward her husband for having gotten spanked in his underwear by porn star Stormy Daniels. Could an above-the-grass Roy squeeze in?

Or, would legal warrior Cohn sit in the lawyer section, which might be broken down into the disbarred (Paul Manafort, Rudy Giuliani, Jeffrey Clark, et al), and the in good standing? Perhaps, given Roy’s penchant for beautiful women, real estate and showmanship, he could be seated in the “Small-time Real Estate Lawyer channeling Marilyn Monroe in a form-fitting gown at Madison Square Garden cum White House Advisor” section? Admittingly, very select, but who wouldn’t want to be a fly on the padded chair for that convo between firebrand Roy and pitbull Alina?

Then there is the Frankenstein section. Roy could sit next to Jeff Zucker, who innocently enough perpetrated a most significant crime in world history, by elevating a six-time bankrupt to business genius on NBC’s “The Apprentice” — paving his way to the White House.

And, the next day, after a 24-hour countdown has yielded peace in Ukraine, ol’ Roy goes to work…

“Retribution,” Roy’s forte, is a good place to start. Would the burgeoning political career of the Central Park 5’s Yusef Salaam — one that mirrors Trump’s in its celebration of redemption — come to a halt at the litigious hands of Counselor Cohn? After grinding down these five victims to a nub Roy could move on to audial twin Michael Cohen. A team of Hollywood script writers could sketch out what’s in store for dear Michael but they’d never approximate what Roy would do. To call it ghoulish is to low key it.

Raymond Babbitt wouldn’t be able to tabulate the number of lawsuits Roy would bring.

After Roy dispenses the likes of Liz Cheney, Anthony Scaramucci and Mary Trump he can move on to the media (we actually got a glimpse of how this works when — privy to private, accurate polls — the billionaire owners of the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times bowed out of the endorsement business prior to Nov. 5). Ali Abbasi, Rachel Maddow, Stephen Colbert and others would be advised to look into skeleton removal, ASAP.

And how America gets its news will be unrecognizable after Roy and Elon Musk get finished.

Roy will also take charge of seeing that sports are returned to the glory days of Joe DiMaggio and Esther Williams, each exactly defining which side they played for.

But a man of Roy’s hyperfocus will ultimately zero in on the even-bigger prize — the abolition of the 22nd Amendment. With a compliant Congress and a pliable media this could be as easy as getting Sean Hannity to genuflect to an impending USA Monarchy. Have at it, Roy…

… but, alas, Roy is no longer with us.

So he must be placed in the Apparition section, next to ghosts like John Barron, sharing a snicker with Ivana.

I will miss these festivities.

I have a sock drawer that needs re-arranging.

Marotta is a filmmaker and writer.

What has changed is this: I will no longer spend one joule of energy on Trump. It’s not that I don’t care about America, or that I’m a quitter. It’s just that he and the entire system are just not worth it. I will no longer dwell one second on the atrocities of Donald Trump — I’m out.

Growing up, there was a guy in my neighborhood who was phenomenally lucky, and we called him Lucky Ray. In organized, competitive sports, if Lucky Ray was at bat with the winning runs on base, he’d check-swing a double down the opposite field line to win the game. If he took the last shot in a tied basketball game it would be all net. And it’d never be hit or miss. No — Lucky Ray always seemed to hit. Time after time Lucky Ray won the game. And it wasn’t the result of super talent. He was just lucky.

Later on, if Lucky Ray played poker, he’d never lose. And it’s not that he was some kind of Lancey Howard. If you spotted Lucky Ray at the track you’d try to follow him to the window because by the time the last race was run, he’d end up leaving a winner. Football parlay cards — a sucker bet if ever there was one — a concept you could conjure being affixed with a Trump logo — were not so for Lucky Ray. If he played one, he’d win.

The guy always won. Because he was lucky.

Donald Trump is a version of Lucky Ray. He may just be the luckiest man in world history. And I’m certainly not talking about the gifts bestowed upon him, which are minimal. I’m talking about having luck — as in saving your ass lucky. Falling out of a tree, landing on your feet lucky. And just like Lucky Ray, Trump is not immeasurably talented.

And don’t give me any Jeffersonian adage about luck, and the harder you work the more luck you have. I’d say that applies more to Lucky Ray than Donald Trump.

But Trump’s one undeniable talent is the con. Put him in a courtroom and it’s useless. But put him in an arena of people who are viscerally hurting, hurting from missed mortgage payments or jacked insurance premiums, and it flourishes. Put him in front of people leaden with uneasiness, with fear of the new and the foreign and the perpetually changing and he will thrive. Because a Hall of Fame con man will always play to his crowd.

And Trump will prey on the vulnerable over and over and over again. Prey on them with a bogus university, with failed casinos, with bankrupt steaks and vodka and most recently gold sneakers and six-figure watches made in China. Buyer beware: Sadly, the victims of a con job are not only the last to know it, they are more often than not so humiliated that they take their lumps and say nothing. So, they stay in.

Conversely, if Lucky Ray raised on the last card, it’d be smart strategy to get out. Along those lines…

I’m out. Out of the Trump scorecard business. Out of tabulating the obscene and degrading. Of calculating the repulsive. America has spoken and I’m out. The scorekeeping of that now falls to those who voted for him. Until they start, all inventory is meaningless.

I’m out because the broadcast media has failed repeatedly to reveal Trump. Because a good number of them once played footsie with him (Mika, Joe, Howard Stern, Donny Deutsch, et al).

Because you cannot have a Mar-a-Lago dance card and suddenly have a revelation that your host is a fiend — I know that the shortest time spent with Trump reveals him as just that. How much of their opposition was ratings driven, and not from the heart?

I’m also out because I have much better things to do. I have a TV pilot to get made. And I plan to fall in love for the final time in my life.

Whatever happened to Lucky Ray? I heard his luck finally ran out.

I heard he got run over by a bus coming back from the track. There was a good chance he had a pocket stuffed with winnings when he did.

Marotta is a filmmaker and writer.

So we should know exactly what is coming as we witness the unconscionable attempted rehabilitation of Donald J. Trump.

We’ve seen Trump the everyman doing color commentary at a boxing match. Does he long for his gold toilet when attending such events?

We’ve seen Trump the aggrieved, banned from Twitter as he should’ve after his first birtherism lie. Allowing Trump back on Twitter would be akin to the United States building an atom bomb factory in Tokyo post-WWII.

We’ve seen Trump the mentor. Herschel Walker, Trump’s most special friend (sorry, Sean Hannity), the main mentee. I wonder if Walker (and Evander Holyfield and Larry Elder) know that years ago, they could not have rented an apartment in a Trump building.

And if someone would deny a person the right to residence because of the color of their skin, is it really much of a stretch to believe that they would deny the same people of color the right to vote?

We’ve seen Trump the savior, a rerun. Trump the darling of homecoming football fans.

And of course, we can’t ignore the granddaddy of them all — the personal favorite of the flag groper/smacker himself — Trump the patriot. Actually, this has been the underpinning of all his lies but forever remains the most comical of all his fraudulence — a red, white and blue flagbearer for a family with not one military enlistment or conscription in more than 150 years of residence on American soil.

Just as cockroaches scurry toward garbage, liars and shills are re-attaching to Trump. The Kellyanne Conways, Bill O’Reillys, Laura Ingrahams. Their wares are bolstered by entrenched liars like Cindy Adams and Stephen Miller (is it me or does Miller bear a striking physical resemblance to Roy Cohn?).

But cockroaches will dash from the light when shined on them. Dig deep on every lie, new and old. (How is the tax return audit going, Mr. Miller?) When Trump or any co-conspirator lies about stolen elections, end the interview immediately. Illuminate the hole and the vermin will eventually run for it. When they do, squash them and their lies.

It’s not that complicated, really. Trump is a con man. Everything he does must be viewed through that prism. He has no other talent. Dig. Question. Confront. Expose. Rinse. Repeat. Relentlessly.

As for Ivanka, the society swan wannabe might be the most dangerous Trump, sneaking around under her veil of decency. It’s time to rip the veil off before she becomes the ultimate election ratings gimmick, the political equivalent of TV’s Bobby Ewing in the shower — the 2024 vice presidential candidate. Veilless, she may prove to be the most indecent Trump of all.

Eric and Donald Jr.? These two political hobos are riding the train to wherever they can find acceptance, their pot of mulligan stew. It seems almost too easy to reveal them. Why are they still here?

Donald J. Trump is the rancid onion lodged under the dumpster for weeks in ninety-degree heat. To peel it is to endure unbearable rottenness. Under each layer oozes more and more stench. The tax returns. Russian paper held on him. The failed coup d’etat. Thievery. Racism. Intolerance. Sexual assault. Unfathomable delusion. Incredible untruth.

Final victory will be won on the margins. Trump’s cult will not cave. Enlighten every undecided voter. It’s time for the world’s uber-rich to anoint Trump, self-professed business genius, a failure and a joke. Time for all military leadership to announce Trump a traitorous danger to the existence of the planet, to warn that his next insurrection on democracy may be a flick of the nuclear switch.

There is no time for any humanizations of this demon — right down to the hair jostlings of Jimmy Fallon.

As recent books have proved, the truth does exist. If it’s out there for release years later, what is to prevent it from being reported in real-time? Dig. Question. Confront. Expose. Rinse. Repeat. The discharge of Trump is predicated on such. So too, the health of American democracy.

Marotta is a filmmaker and writer.

The two combatants for the world heavyweight title, both undefeated, could not have been more divergent. Muhammad Ali could have been Kurosawa’s muse, so Rashomon-like, so subjective, so self-serving and contradictory. Something to all, everything to others. Joe Frazier, on the other hand, was blue-collar specific. South Carolina humble, South Philadelphia smoke. Their symbiotic relationship is timeless — Ali robust with shuffles and dance, Frazier ever advancing, repeating with left hooks.

One could legitimately argue that the true and fair starting date for professional sports in America is 1947, the year that Jackie Robinson starred on Major League Baseball diamonds, which up to then, prejudice and hatred had decided he would not. Olympian Jesse Owens, with magnificent athleticism, and boxer Joe Louis, employing controlled fury, both spat in the face of white supremacy, but it would be more than a decade later before Jackie (and shortly thereafter, Larry Doby) would flush Jim Crow back to the bowels of Dixie and away from America’s ballparks. (That’s the thing about white supremacy: it remains a disgustingly resilient scourge).

But March 8, 1971, stands as the lodestar for sports in America, the day competition transcended its man-made boundaries and indelibly rubbed up against society’s soul. The epic fight touched everyone, even those who had no clue what was going on in the middle of the Madison Square Garden ring.

And much of what remains from the lessons of that historic night remains today in one form or another.

Rooting interests in the fight divided along racial lines. Most white people backed Frazier, most Blacks, Ali, even though any examination of Joe’s personal life story would yield a tale much more closely hewed from the African-American experience in this country than that of Ali. Southern sharecropper poor, migrant to the promising North alone at fifteen, Frazier was the Black Joad. Ali was raised middle class all the way, labeled uppity, became a Black Muslim. Fifty years later, the yoke of race is still easily adjusted and manipulated in America. Up until weeks ago, white supremacists were more welcome in the White House than journalists.

Ali’s anti-Vietnam war stance made him the darling of the left. It was more than a stance — he was so dug in, bursting with conviction, and fervently willing to forfeit the money and baubles of his profession, that it remains one of the single most courageous positions ever taken by a private citizen in American history. Frazier — conservative, quiet — was the darling of the right. Today, would tough guy Frazier be leeched onto by paper tough guys like Sean Hannity for the purpose of further dividing this country? Would the right have become “patriots” the second Joe landed that left hook in round 15? And would Ali still deny he lost (calling it a “white man’s decision”), proving that delusion is not only a Republican thing?

Ali’s cruelty to Frazier — the name-calling, the verbal abuse, the mocking that went beyond mere ticket salesmanship and promotion — was a through-line to the fight. It was wrong and below him and hurtful. I know that Joe forgave him, because I asked him about it many years later on the sports and entertainment radio show I used to host. “If you were stuck on an elevator, alone with Ali, just the two of you, what would you say to him?” I asked.

“I would say, hop on my back, I’ll take you out of here, you don’t keep hate in your heart forever,” Joe replied. Dignity and forgiveness personified. America, pay attention to that smiling, fedora-wearing left hook-thrower.

Ali’s activism still resonates today. Black professional athletes are steeled to use their public forum for fighting wrong wherever they see it. Strides made in Black voter registration prove that their voices are heard. Black athletes have turned Fox News host Laura Ingraham’s order to “shut up and dribble” into a command more relevant for the last president than to basketball great LeBron James.

It’s been 50 years since the world stopped to watch a prizefight. Who would say that America is more civil, more upright, more kind today than in 1971? The same ills and problems — racism, intolerance, political warring — exponentially cleave a punch-drunk America five decades later. It’s fair to ask where we are as a country. The answer may lie in an echo of the despair of boxer Mountain Rivera in the film “Requiem for a Heavyweight”: I’m in America and it’s raining.

Marotta is a filmmaker.

How did it happen? How did it really happen?

The answer is not found in some Toquevillian study. Nor in political theory about the left-out millions, the Trumpian disenfranchised. Experts like erudite Rick Wilson can opine about accountability in these pages, but it still doesn’t answer the question in its simplest terms.

How did it happen?

And it really is quite simple. Like numbered shell casings on a sidewalk crime scene, the answer is there if we connect the evidence. But first we’ll eliminate some of the usual suspects before we get to the guilty.

We won’t get the answer by examining Dr. Frankenstein to the monster, Fred Trump Sr. No, his effect on the son is too obvious, too mutant. Too easily defined as entrenched in cowardice and racism, which remain the adamantine pilings of his miscreant offspring. Cowardice that has produced a family with not one military veteran in well over 150 years of life on American soil.

Nor by inspecting the mentoring effect of the tiny rodent, Roy Cohn, who died with all the self hate his quotidian reflection could yield whenever he looked in the mirror. Who died in possession of a special gift from his star pupil, diamond cufflinks, that were later proven to be counterfeit. The final remnant of a marriage of lies.

The same goes for Michael Cohen, who must bathe in guilty blood.

And we won’t indict current enablers like Jack Dorsey, so speciously against conspiracy yet who still allowed the coward to perpetrate the malicious lie of Birtherism for so many years with so much impunity. He’s too much of an opportunist to make our list.

Let’s start with the ancient Cindy Adams, whose lies created a bedrock of mistruth that has steeled a coward for almost 50 years. Best athlete. Best dealmaker. Swashbuckler. Swordsman. It goes beyond gossip and selling papers. Compatriot of John Barron, she set the bar for every liar that followed her. Decades of lies produced a malignancy.

There’s Jeff Zucker. Top dog at NBC, he hoisted upon the country “The Apprentice,” a myth of acumen and generosity that the New York business and philanthropic communities who knew the star of the show immediately rejected as fraudulent. But people in Kansas did not and they now had a reason to pay attention to that “business guy” with the “funny wig.” And when his cowardly star spewed the vile lie of Birtherism, he kept him on the air. Zucker is guilty.

As is Mark Burnett. Under the veil of religious zeal, he concealed the coward’s racism and hatred and painted him as a resilient Michaelangelo. This evil genius was able to convince those in the flyover states that counsel on the sale of submarine sandwiches made a reality star qualified presidential material. If he is sitting on taped evidence of the coward’s racism, he is covered in blood. The same goes for any talent, crew or gofer who remains silent, especially the two-faced Omarosa Manigault, who once advocated for genuflection before the cur.

Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski (regular footsie players with the coward at Mar-a-Lago), the suddenly enlightened Donny Deutsch and enriched author Tony Schwartz, among others (Howard Stern, Erin Burnett, Anthony Scaramucci), are bloodstained abettors that should be disavowed, lest it happen again. Tell us what you really know.

Reporters, columnists, producers. Are they really responsible for this monstrosity? Ask yourself where would the coward be if he were the rightful target of a deep dig way back when. Would he have prospered to the depths of always wanting a Congressional Medal of Honor when, in fact, he fought the Vietnam War from the front table of Maxwell’s Plum?

And be warned. Lurking in the fog of hate and alternative facts are the coward’s spawn. No Charlottesville torch will enlighten Jared Kushner or Ivanka. Don Junior and Eric will continue to walk tall with white supremacists.

The plain simple truth and a relentless quest for it is our best defense against them.

Marotta is a filmmaker.

But the 18-34s will eventually get their sports back. Years from now, they will embrace their Super Bowl and their Super Fight and who would drop dead from shock if the combatants they root for and gamble on are also named Manning and Mayweather? Chances are they will hardly remember the dagger of this pandemic.

But what about us weaned on Octobers filled with Koufax and Gibson and strikeouts by the truckload, of The Miracle Mets and Swoboda levitating in right field? Of summers filled with Mantle dragging his body into heroics, of Mays in center, where triples went to die? And has there ever been a bigger baseball hero than Yaz in 1967? For us, no.

What about us, we of Wilt vs. Russell and Willis in the tunnel? Of Arnie’s Army and Bob Beamon defying gravity? And Jim Brown and Joe Namath and Gale Sayers sloshing in the mud? And Cassius Clay and Cosell and the greatest sporting event in history, Ali versus Frazier, 15 rounds at The Garden?

We started our love affair with sports during a time when they exploded across our TV sets into our living rooms with dynasties, superstars and personalities, and we took them to school with us and college and, some of us to the rice paddies of Vietnam. Lombardi’s gap-toothed grin, Lew Alcindor’s graceful style and O.J. running from the Rose Bowl to LaGuardia and all the way to the 405.

We would go to Stan’s before and after Whitey dazzled and Reggie stood up. And the Jerome Cafeteria with older men dressed in suits and ties and fedoras to watch a football game. Orange drinks at Nedick’s tasted better after Clyde dropped 30.

Later on, George Martin became our Mike Manuche or Toots Shor and if we were lucky, leprechaun lucky, we’d catch Pete Axthelm at The Palm working the phone booth by the tiny bar. For the 18-34s I am sure Instagram or Snapchat or Tik Tok or whatever other social media platform they use serves as their virtual watering hole.

I preferred the sociability of the first table at Elaine’s, tucked under the TV by the door, after a Yankee or Knick win. Today, they are all gone. Just like all the games and all the sports as we remember them.

Do those of us who are beginning to keep score on more than games — on years and age — get back the years we could lose in this age of lost sports? And if we do, who has more pages in that book than us, the children of Mantle and Maris, of Oscar and West? Us, of Ameche going in from the one and The Impossible Dream and The Ice Bowl?

It is small and selfish and even more than ridiculous to agonize about sports when death surrounds us. It absolutely is. Will some of us even care about games going forward? Will it help us re-define “hero,” applying it to nurses and doctors and the kid who works through the night to stock the shelves of ShopRite, just like 9/11 did? How did that work out? How soon after did we short the cops and firemen and first responders who ran toward the buildings, substituting right fielders and relief pitchers for those whom so justifiably merit the word?

The 18-34s will shake this off, of that I have no doubt. The uniforms will get more stylish, the apps more alluring. Guys my age, the children of Unitas, subscribers to the canon of Jim McKay, John Facenda and Jack Whitaker, I am not so sure. We are one step closer to the final whistle.

Marotta is a filmmaker.

My appointment answered the door of his Fort Lee, N.J., penthouse in his bathrobe and led me into the living room. He was representing a future New York baseball icon, as any close family member would. Less than three months earlier he himself made front page news by beating a health crisis of major proportions.

“Inspirational,” the tabloids called him. I reveled in his recovery and evenly prepared to deal with his irascible nature in an effort to sign his brother.

On a coffee table, under the sports page, were what appeared to be stacks of dollar bill-sized cardboard. Two landlines, their ringers muted to a dull buzz accompanied two cell phones. This guy was not going to miss a call.

A young lady handling FedEx envelopes reached for the stacks and revealed that underneath the newspaper laid over 500 glossy tickets to Super Bowl XXXI-street value, over a million dollars. Today this haul would be worth anywhere from five to ten million cash. “Inspirational” to scalpers everywhere.

Here was a baseball guy in possession of a good chunk of football’s lucre: tickets to the Super Bowl, feathers from the NFL’s Golden Fleece. Admittance to the kingdom, a palpable invite to the real party of the game’s aristocracy and all that surrounds the biggest day in sports.

About 1% of all Super Bowl tickets take a direct route into the hands of NFL fans. When taxpayer money pays for glittering new stadiums from coast to coast, that is an obscenity. Let the market dictate the ticket price but at least give the unconnected fan a realistic chance to buy.

Averaging over two million dollars in salary, each NFL player gets to buy two Super Bowl tickets at face value (up to $2,500 this year). These four thousand or so tickets are promptly scalped to insiders at five times the cost. Those ducats that aren’t claimed at the game site by players (the tariff factored into the scalp) are returned to the team and then slipped to connected guys like the baseball lifer. That’s over $20 million in commerce funneled to moneyed athletes rather than getting those tickets into the hands of TV ratings generating, merchandise buying, fantasy league participating, everyday fans. That’s a disgrace.

One quarter of all Super Bowl tickets go to media members, media partners and sponsors. Really? Well, who’s buying what these entities peddle more so than the blue collar fan? Why not pass on some of this haul directly to them? Even local contests and promotions that try to do this must bear the aristocratic imprimatur of the NFL. And the fan friendly NFL Experience of the host city? It charges admission. Not a very generous or affable experience for those not part of the ruling class.

The NFL passes a set amount of tickets to the teams and accounts for all others in house, down to the ticket. In the nineties, many of them were run by the now-defunct NFL Properties, a cesspool of skim and corruption. In keeping with that spirit, tickets that trickle down to fans from the teams must now pay a vigorish to a hospitality company partly owned by the team owners. Not very hospitable.

Nefarious boxing promoter Don King once said of bootleggers who were selling knockoff merchandise along the Vegas Strip during Mike Tyson’s mega fights, “Let them make a living.” Roger Goodell has spearheaded a nationwide assault on all unlicensed Super Bowl merchandise and activities promising prosecution.

Even glitzy parties in the host city must carry the seven-figure stamp of the NFL: licensed hats and horns for the aristocracy, not “Joe Fan” who may have miraculously scored a game ticket. If it could strong arm Super Bowl box pools, the league would do that too. When you lose the compassion comparison to Don King, it’s time to take notice.

Pro football, so much of its popularity built on the backs of steel workers and coal miners and meat packers and subway riders, owes an adamantine debt to the common man. He’ll just never collect in person on Super Sunday.

Marotta is a documentary filmmaker and radio talk show host.

I got up and felt nauseous, and my body convulsed with chills. I walked the block to my house and kept my mother clueless as to what had happened. She brought me the usual cold remedies as I lay on the couch, but I had a football game to watch — Army-Navy, with Roger Staubach at QB. I didn’t begin to feel right until Christmas, when I got a Giants helmet, one with the lowercase “ny” on the side, as I continued to consume anything and everything that had to do with football.

I was lucky enough to go to every Giants home game at Yankee Stadium in the mid-60s. My favorite gameday ritual was eating with my father at the Jerome Cafeteria (roast beef, mashed potatoes and near enough green beans) packed in like sardines with men in suits and fedoras encircled in cigar smoke, many of them waiting in line to use the payphones.

I had a catbird view of Gifford’s one-handed miracle catch across the middle that helped snatch the Eastern Conference from the Pittsburgh Steelers. I got to watch Joe Namath to Don Maynard for the AFL Title from the outfield bleachers at Shea. I absorbed football and loved every minute of it, live and on TV.

I became a highly recruited high school player and played major college football. I felt the physical pain and loneliness of having both ACLs re-constructed, the second one five months before the start of my senior season. Some would say I gave both legs to the sport, but I prefer to say I continued to play because I loved the game.

When I flipped the ball to the ref after a seven yard gain against West Virginia, I knew that the end of me playing for keeps was near. Still I believed in my heart that I would always love football.

I was wrong.

I regret that kids today don’t play football for the love of it, on the playground or anywhere else where sides can be chosen. I dislike the orchestrations around youth football, one eye on marketing and the other on selling junk. I loathe that NFL-licensed video games have a stranglehold on America’s youth. And I deplore the hypocrisy of NFL-sponsored programs to combat the very problems that these addictions help create, like obesity and poor health.

I miss the Green Bay sweep. I can’t stand the spread offense and I can’t stand that scoreboards tell the fans what to do. All we ever needed was to watch Robustelli and Huff to commence with “De-Fense.” And I miss the drunks at the bar next to the Jerome Cafeteria, replaced by just about everybody in the stands today.

I miss “Franco’s Italian Army” and “Gerela’s Gorillas.” PSLs and club seating probably close the door on this bonding ever happening again.

I wish for a celebrating Homer Jones or Elmo Wright and all I get are Marshawn Lynch and Doug Baldwin.

I detest that we traded Big Daddy Libscomb, Alex Karras, Joe Don Looney and Fred Williamson for the likes of Greg Hardy, Johnny Manziel, Pacman Jones and Lawrence Phillips.

I want John Facenda back. And Jack Whitaker. And Bruce Roberts on “Countdown to Kickoff” and maybe after the game if time allowed. I don’t like graphics and scrolls and exploding robots. I’d pay substantially for another Ray Scott.

I hate the NFL’s duplicitous stance on gambling, denying it drives interest and TV ratings. I hate that we’ve gone from Pete Axthelm and Leonard Tose and Gene Klein to a bunch of kids at DraftKings and FanDuel.

I abhor the Super Bowl Aristocracy.

I curse the fact that NFL veterans do not have lifetime health insurance, amid the ghoulish shadow of CTE. As a former agent, I know first-hand that players are really nothing more than high priced chattel.

Mostly though, I no longer love football because I resent the NFL campaigning to tell us “why we love football.” I hate the feel-good essays and stories and contests and commercials and PR campaigns all devised around the 24-hour, 365-day sale of The National Football League.

Some of us really loved football. We didn’t need to be upsold.

Marotta is a documentary filmmaker and radio talk show host.