The framework of sports, the scaffolding we’ve long constructed around winners and losers, touchdowns and home runs, well, it no longer paints the full picture. The games are back, but no longer do we concern ourselves exclusively with what goes on between the lines, but with what is going on inside the players’ heads. Will we ever just cover the games again?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, about how to feel about sports and the athletes that play them, if the tenets that haven’t simply fueled my personal rooting interests going back to my childhood but have filled my professional mandate for the better part of three decades can, or should, be viewed in the same way. Am I watching just to immerse myself in the pure joy and drama of action, moved to share impressions of the final scores and best story lines with readers? Or am I here to develop this moment of the bigger picture in time, when activism among athletes is at an all-time high?

Write about the game, and risk doing a disservice to the activism. Write about the activism, and risk burying the drama of the game. Write about the games, and wonder how much it matters. Write about the activism, and wonder how much people care. This is the Catch-22 revealed in reader e-mails, Boston Globe.com comments, and sportswriter Twitter mentions, where the backlash to stories about activism is filled with a “don’t-mix-sports-and-politics” anger, but stories purely about the action feel insignificant in comparison to the issues.

It’s a conundrum crystallized most sincerely in players — if it’s hard to know how to write about games, can you imagine what it’s like to play them? It was the words of Patriot brothers Devin and Jason McCourty that stuck with me these past few days, their despair and hopelessness revealing just how difficult it can be to reconcile what is going on in the world with what is supposed to be going on on the field.

“I know a lot of other guys I’ve talked to in the locker room right now, we’re just lost, man,” Jason said Thursday, when a handful of other NFL teams suspended practice in lieu of team-wide conversations about racial inequity, ones fueled once again by a police-involved shooting of a Black man, Jacob Blake, in Kenosha, Wis.

“I have no idea why we went out there and practiced today,” Jason added. “I feel like we all just go through the motions. We’ve all kind of become so numb to this because it’s happened so many times and in so many different places that we’re all just confused. There’s a sense of hopelessness of just not knowing or understanding how to fix a problem.”

Devin was just as sad in trying to straddle the divide. Practice, what does it do? Don’t practice, what does it do?

“I know we could take a whole day off and we could talk about a whole bunch of different things. We have talked as a team. We’ve done all that stuff. It just hasn’t mattered,” he said. “Obviously, football distracts people from that. But if there was no football, I don’t think people are still going to care about Black and brown people in our country.”

How can anyone hear that and not be moved to empathy? How can anyone hear that and say, ‘Just go out and play’? This is a mental health challenge for all players, from the isolation inside an NBA, WNBA or NHL bubble to the protected NFL or MLB fields, one that leaves players trying to balance how important their games are in relation to their lives.

I spoke Friday with Lani Lawrence, a clinical and sports psychologist who is a certified mental performance consultant and who is on the executive board of the Association for Applied Sport Psychology. As one of a handful of full-time directors of clinical services and wellness for an NFL team (she works for the Giants), Lawrence, a Falmouth native and Northeastern alum, saw that pain play itself out across the unprecedented days of canceled games.

“For a lot of players, the boycott wasn’t that all they were trying to do was show solidarity,” she said. “For a lot of them, they mentally would not be able to play. Hearing about this killing is so traumatic. For some athletes, they see themselves when they view the videos or hear these stories, their personal experience, a family member’s experience, for them it can feel and be very traumatic each time there is any kind of issue with police brutality because it acts as a reminder. That can lead to anxiety, fear, hypervigilance, not eating, not sleeping. I think the general public doesn’t appreciate that as much as they can.”

If the pandemic didn’t make choosing to play anxiety-ridden enough as a safety issue, the ongoing protests can make athletes question whether it was worth it if they did.

“I think the boycotts were twofold, one to bring awareness to the issues, but secondly, it was traumatic, and to have players play immediately after something that traumatic happens is in some ways like asking too much,” Lawrence said.

In other words, the conflict is real. I am honored to continue navigating it, to write playoffs one day and protests the next, to join a sports world that is moving forward as a combination of both, even if there are those who might wish otherwise.

Tara Sullivan is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at tara.sullivan@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @Globe_Tara.