Don’t listen to the hype. Despite calls by “Friday Night Lights” author Buzz Bissinger and others, football isn’t going anywhere.

A year ago, I said that if football couldn’t be made safer, it probably shouldn’t exist at all.

But could you imagine our country without it? I can’t.

Junior Seau’s death is another sad casualty of an era where head injuries were shrugged off as no big deal. But this is not an impossible problem.

This country has landed a man on the moon, put a whole army (with the help of the British and the Canadians) on Normandy’s beaches across a storm-tossed English Channel, created the Internet and built a fighter plane invisible to radar that could drop a laser-guided bomb down a chimney.

In a country that has done all of that, we can figure out a way to cut down on head injuries in football.

There will always be risk, especially since football is a game of violent collisions, but let’s not forget that risk is voluntary. Nobody is forced to play football, especially at the college or NFL levels.

Steps are taken to lessen the impacts of head injuries to players’ health.

Already, a return to fundamentals, where tacklers keep their heads up and see what they hit, is returning in a big way. Suspected concussions are treated with the seriousness they deserve. There will be new helmet designs that cushion the head from repeated blows at close range suffered by offensive linemen and protect other players from different high-speed collisions. Rules changes will happen, likely ending kickoffs.

Football was threatened with extinction during its early days. And survived, thanks to new innovations in the rules, like the ban of the flying wedge formation and the reduction of on-field players from 15 to 11.

If it couldn’t be snuffed out in its infancy, what makes people think that it will be snuffed out when it has become the nation’s true sport?

Imagine a country without football. Thousands in the NFL and associated with college and high school programs would lose lucrative jobs. Revenues in the billions would cease to exist.

Small college towns, swelled by thousands of fans, would take an economic hit of epic proportions.

The allure of Friday night lights would vanish and communities would lose a reason to come together when the leaves change in the fall to cheer on their sons, nephews, cousins and neighbors. A vital source of teaching life lessons to youngsters and a beacon of community pride would vanish.

But if lawsuits and the threat of lawsuits cause football’s extinction, what will replace it in our culture? And what would become of all of those fall Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays become?

For one, a lot less fun.

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Steve Wilson is sports editor of The Vicksburg Post. You can follow him on Twitter at vpsportseditor. He can be reached at 601-636-4545, ext. 142 or at swilson@vicksburgpost.com.