Retired Pro Bowl quarterback Jeff Blake says that removing air from footballs was common when he played in the NFL from 1992-2005.

“I’m just going to let the cat of the bag, every team does it, every game, it has been since I played,” the ex-Jets QB said Wednesday in a radio interview on the “Midday 180″ show on Nashville’s 104.5 The Zone. “Cause when you take the balls out of the bag, they are rock hard. And you can’t feel the ball as well. It’s too hard.

“Everybody puts the pin in and takes just enough air out of the ball that you can feel it a little better. But it’s not the point to where it’s flat. So I don’t know what the big deal is. It’s not something that’s not been done for 20 years. … I would say (to a ball boy), ‘Take a little bit of air out of it. It’s a little bit hard,'” Blake said. “And then he’d take a little bit out and I’d squeeze it and I’d be like, ‘OK, it’s perfect.’ That’s it.”

Oh dear Lord. This is a scandal I don’t think we’ll ever recover from.

I mean, the air pressure inside eleven footballs during one half of a blowout football game has been the biggest story of 2015. So this ought to rock America to it’s very foundation. Apparently football pressure integrity is one of the pillars of our republic. Written into the Constitution somewhere between free speech and right to a jury trial.

So the fact that NFL quarterbacks have been letting the air out of balls since Tom Brady was wearing Garanimals just gives lie to everything we stand for. Forget Watergate or Teapot Dome or the 1919 Black Sox. This is the kind of crisis that gives lie to everything you ever believed in. Once you’ve lost faith in your ability to believe in the sanctity of “12.5-to-14.5 PSI,” how can you trust anything ever again?

We might as well just take all the Lombardi trophies won over the last twenty years and just melt them down into asterisks, disband every NFL team, raze all the stadiums, close down civilization and go move back to the forest because our whole lives have been a lie. This is exactly what the Fall of Rome must have felt like.* Oh well, America. It was fun while it lasted.