In many ancient cultures, long hair was every bit as much a sign of the warrior’s elite status as his armor. To forcibly shave the samurai’s topknot was to shame him; to shear Samson’s locks was to unman him. So too now for fallen Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers, whose flowing Nicolas Cage-like mane was a once a nationally renowned symbol of his individuality and belief in personal freedom before a trade to the lowly New York Jets apparently reduced him to pre-superserum Steve Rogers.

As much as it hurts to see Captain America stripped of his uniform and shrunken back to normal size before our eyes, perhaps we can wish him well in the happy obscurity he seeks; this is the moving coda to Avengers: Endgame we never got due to budget cuts. (It cost too much to stage in New York City . . . hey, just ask the Jets.) The shameful pictures — now spreading maliciously on social media, because people can be so cruel — of him shorn, tamed, and holding a Jets jersey will live on in America’s cultural memory as an image of defeat every bit as haunting as that of the ABC Wide World of Sports skier tumbling to eternally looped disgrace. But perhaps it is better to choose exile willingly.

For those who desire a theory explaining Aaron Rodgers’s sudden collapse from superhero to quarterback for New York’s fourth-most popular football team out of three, I will point you to the extended time he has spent floating in water isolation tanks. To be fair, my research into this subject is mostly confined to Ken Russell films and Jack Butler NR columns, but empirical analysis suggests it has an unfortunate tendency to lead either to long-distance running or spontaneous devolution into an earlier, more primitive state. (Scientists have named this state “New Jersey.”)

Anthropologists have observed for decades that certain environments, like the Amazon rainforest, are simply inhospitable to advanced civilization due to natural habitat. So too it is with the mid-Atlantic, as all escapees know. There may be no answer to the mystery of Aaron Rodgers’s sudden regression from professional football player to New York Jet. But the truth is still out there.