It is the story that won’t go away. Easy in this culture that struggles comically to separate rumor from fact to wish that it would. Failure to learn from the blink of an eye that has linked Tony Stewart and Kevin Ward Jr. for eternity, however, would heap tragedy upon tragedy.

Ward’s life inexplicably is over at 20, and Stewart’s legacy as racing champion and multi-millionaire businessman is clouded forever. That much we know. Contrary to what YouTube, Deadspin, ESPN, Twitter and the Associated Press might have informed us, it’s all we know. It might be all we ever know.

Two extreme forces are at work here.

We have the cavalier, fatalistic, “when it’s your time to go” attitude of the average race fan, myself included. We are so desensitized by decades of watching our favorite drivers veer head-on into concrete walls, never to be heard from again, that we can’t function as normal human beings. We venerate heroes who die with their boots on and approach it all with an alarming level of acceptance.

Make no mistake. If race fans were in charge of the sport, we never would have hailed the arrival of window nets, five-point harnesses, head and neck restraints or steel-and-foam barriers — all developments that have made our favorite activity exponentially safer. They would have been dismissed as unmanly and unnecessary. It took the rich, collar-and-tie-wearing guys who were worried about insurance rates, horrible publicity and possible government intervention to rise above the folly and introduce change.

And on the other side of the aisle, we have members of the media and the general public who don’t enjoy, or “get,” racing. They chase ambulances more enthusiastically than the lawyers imploring you to get what you deserve between afternoon soap opera segments. They report the sport’s death toll in hushed, exaggerated tones, never acknowledging that every racer is infinitely safer on the track than he is while navigating Route 11 in his hauler on the way home.

Therefore, in a related note, an unfortunate conviction of race fans is that we don’t suffer newcomers well. That is, unless they’re buying one of those empty seats or reporting something puffy and positive about our sport.

It has been said and suggested in the past seven days that people without a vast background in motorsports have no business reporting this story. That’s foolish, of course. I’m not required to use recreational drugs before I’m entitled to an opinion about the legalization of marijuana. You don’t need to become a doctor prior to weighing in on health care.

Our hurry to have this story swept under the rug isn’t any nobler than the uninitiated’s rush to judgment. Let’s get that straight. But a rush to judgment, it is. Because, by golly, we have amateur video and eyewitness detail. Let’s settle this sucker right now.

Please. While it was aired more widely and with less respect for the victim(s) than any footage since the attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan, the dark, grainy clip of Ward meeting his tragic demise is anything but conclusive.

Never mind that there is one second, tops, between the time Stewart enters the frame and when Ward is trapped beneath the right rear tire of Stewart’s car. You have no idea if he “hit the throttle” or “swerved” toward the deceased. Thousands of people demonstrated this week on social media that they can’t even spell those words, let alone use them correctly in a sentence.

Also, there’s the not-so-minor issue of the lighting at Canandaigua, which, like almost every track in America, is potent as what’s hanging from the ceiling of the bingo hall at your county fairgrounds. This is not Gillette Stadium, folks. Making vast improvements to their 1975 electrical system is not something most short track promoters can afford to do, if they harbor any desire to remain in business.

And lastly, but arguably most crucial to what I see as Stewart’s clear innocence, are the choices Ward made in the final 15 seconds of his life. Unhooking his safety equipment. Climbing from the cockpit. Hotfooting down to what appears the geographical center of the racing surface, while wearing a black fire suit, standing among vehicles rife with blind spots and fat tires, to express his displeasure with another driver.

Our society has a silly superstition about saying anything that could be construed as speaking ill of the dead. Sometimes when you don’t speak, though, you do the departed a greater disservice. And you can’t do what Ward did. You just can’t. It is no different than walking from your disabled vehicle to the double yellow line and attempting to wave down help changing a flat tire. It’s a natural, foolhardy impulse if you’ve already had a bad day, but you don’t follow through if you have any illusion of getting home safely to your spouse and kids.

I am of the unshakable belief that if God and the universe gave both men the chance to treat this moment as a DVR recording and rewind 30 seconds, neither would behave the same way. Ward would stay in his car, go back to his transporter, change his clothes, pound down a couple of Gatorades and wait for Stewart to finish the race before getting in his chronically unshaven face. And Stewart would steer to the apron of the race track, far enough from the belly of the beast to save Ward from becoming a victim of his own road rage.

But then our teachable moment — the one that hopefully will save dozens of other men from suffering this same fate — would have been lost. Because people have been struck and killed by cars on speedways before, y’all. They just never got hit by a three-time Sprint Cup champion.

Its hand forced by that fame, the racing community’s response has fallen on the spectrum between reactionary and proactive. Just as the SAFER barrier and HANS device are associated with Dale Earnhardt, everyone from NASCAR to New England short tracks put new standards in place this week that may come to be known as the Stewart-Ward Rules. Except in the rare case of fire, stay in your crashed car until safety crews arrive. No exceptions.

I question how long those zero-tolerance policies will be enforced, because too many racing lifers accept this finger-waving and chest-thumping under the invisible “part of the game” umbrella. You know, like hockey fights, or throwing a 98 mph fastball underneath someone’s whiskers.

Someday, and someday soon, an athlete in one of those sports will die at the hands of a big-timer, and we’ll have this same silly national conversation. Outsiders will drop words such as “homicide” and “manslaughter” and demand satisfaction. Insiders will call the outsiders vile names and promote one or both parties in the fatal dust-up as heroes of the faith.

Which means we’ll miss the real message: This was dumb, and how do we keep it from happening again?

Kalle Oakes is a staff writer. His email is koakes@sunjournal.com. Follow him on Twitter @Oaksie72.