As both a doctor-in-training and a starter for the defending Super Bowl champions, chiefs guard Laurent Duvernay-Tardif had to pick between passions this summer. His choice: Play football in 2020, or opt-out. Starting in April, he worked for nine weeks in a long-term care facility in Quebec. He drew blood, dispensed medications, and tended to elderly patients, and went back to work when roughly a dozen tested positive for COVID. 

The heroic work done by nurses, orderlies, and caretakers to confront a global pandemic, changed how Duvernay-Tardif looked at medicine. It reinforced the need for humanity, empathy, and connection.

As Duvernay-Tardif wrote for SI in April, "if we were still struggling to contain the virus by the start of football season, we would still have a major problem..." 
And here we were, with close to 70,000 new cases a day.

Duvernay-Tardif served on the COVID-19 task force for the NFLPA. He had no issue with the protocols and spoke only for himself, believing that his experience as a doctor informed his decision to step away.

This fall, he plans to study public health at Harvard, return to the long-term care facility to pitch in and root for his teammates to repeat as champions. That way they can try for a third-straight title when he returns in 2021.