The sad and cautionary tale of Junior Seau will shed a floodlight on the epidemic of head injuries in sports, and rightfully so.

Call it evolution or credit nutrition, supplements and the weight bench. Doesn’t matter, long as everyone is aware that athletes are bigger, stronger and faster than ever, and that the games they play might need to be adjusted accordingly whether we like it or not.

I’m just worried that we’re putting all our teachable moment eggs into that object lesson basket.

All the scientists in the world could examine Seau’s brain and it would never tell us what we want to know with certainty. We may never understand what triggered a certain first-ballot Hall of Fame linebacker to take his own life before he had the chance to don that golden blazer.

Concussions are a hot-button issue in athletics, but they aren’t the only issue. I wonder if we’re searching for an easy explanation simply because the more complex ones might hit too close to home. Or maybe a closer examination would force us to admit that some elements inherent to sports might be part of the problem.

Please don’t misunderstand. I obviously, unequivocally love sports. I consider them one of the Creator’s greatest gifts. Being able to play, watch and write about them for a living has been perhaps my greatest outlet; the ever-present escape from the anxieties and stresses in my life.

Along that journey, however, my adult awareness of these children’s games has crept in. Now I recognize that the emphasis we place on the wins, the losses, the moments, is often hopelessly out of whack.

We’re furious with shady corporations and the politicians who protect them, but we don’t even hiccup when our favorite slugger signs a $225 million contract.

We tell our kids that their work in the classroom is what counts, but the exploits of the football captain are accompanied by a life-size photo while the speech and debate captain’s high honors are documented in six-point type on Page B9.

For years people have pointed out that inequity to me. My response, accurate if flippant, is that we’re responding to market demand. Three thousand people aren’t paying $8 a pop to watch Johnny give an extemporaneous oratory.

America speaks with its wallet. We pay more indiscriminately and cheer more loudly as the level of play increases.

So what happens when the money stops falling from the sky and the cheering ends? I think it’s worth at least asking ourselves if that vacuum, and not the damage wrought by two decades of occasional head-to-head collisions, was the inspiration for Seau’s final act.

It’s eerie now, but Seau was one that I always worried about. I worried about him for the same reason that Brett Favre and Tiger Woods concern me. He played the game for so long, with such absurd abandon, and yet in the spring and summer we never saw him wearing a suit at ESPN or poking fun at himself on “Saturday Night Live.” He hadn’t transitioned into ownership or any other public, prolific distractions.

Others wield less star power and make infinitely less money in their sport. The cheering ceases decades earlier. I know many of them personally, and I worry no less.

You know them too. Possibly one eats dinner at your table every night.

They’re our local athletes. As the tri-county daily newspaper of record, we treat their playoff games and championship meets as if they’re the Super Bowl, complete with giant headlines and colorful photo spreads.

It’s a fabulous tradition, one that builds scrapbooks and frames memories for generations to come. I honor and cherish our role as historians. I also wrestle with it on a daily basis.

Sometimes I wonder if it’s too much. Our young people already confront a silly amount of pressure from parents and members of the community. Add the media, building up those wins and losses as the be-all, end-all of the scholastic sports experience, and perhaps you have the recipe for disillusionment and distorted reality.

So many of these impressionable minds are more mature and grounded than those two and three times their age. The problem is, we have no way of knowing which ones aren’t.

We turn them into local heroes — superstars, even — for two, three, four years.

Then the cheering stops. The real world beckons. It’s a world of failed relationships, lost jobs and sudden stops. Of over-their-head college classes and expenses up the wazoo.

Without the games and the adulation to furnish a distraction, those young adults find other distractions. Some are destructive, even fatal.

In the past decade I’ve lived through two suicide clusters — whether the natives have the courage to call them that or not — involving current and former athletes in two of our most passionate local sports communities.

That’s two too many. And while I’m wise enough to realize that sports was far from the only extenuating issue in the departed’s lives, I’m objective enough to admit that it was part of the big picture.

Which means that all of us — journalists, parents, friends and fans — need to examine our place in that picture. Failure to do so is failing the kids, the games and the region that we love.

Yes, chronic brain injury is a daunting issue in sports. Let’s address it. Let’s just remember that repeated blows to the head aren’t the only thing that shapes an athlete’s brain.

Kalle Oakes is a staff columnist. His email is [email protected].