Football, politics, and baseball’s seventh-inning stretch.

Early this century, Rush Limbaugh was hired by ESPN and Dennis Miller sat beside Al Michaels in the Monday Night Football booth. Limbaugh’s gig — which lasted a month — tasked him with talking about Peyton Manning and Brett Favre, Michael Strahan and Derrick Brooks, on ESPN’s NFL Sunday Countdown show. Whatever your politics — whether you love Limbaugh and Miller, hate them, or have no opinion at all — the fact that a conservative radio titan and a political satirist who leans right could score these elite sports-commentary posts might provoke a moment’s reflection. It did for me, at least, when the memory bubbled up.

Could something like this happen today? Even typing the question makes me think of that dark, despairing laughter at the end of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Cask of Amontillado.” It makes me wish I could insert a gif of someone violently shaking their head with a sardonic smile. Imagine the uproar if Limbaugh got the call to join Randy Moss and Charles Woodson and Co. on the 2018 version of Countdown. Imagine the amount of crap ESPN would take if they decided it was time for a Dennis Miller sequel in the MNF booth.

Now, you might say, “I take your point about Limbaugh. America had to have been a little calmer for Rush to join Countdown after what had been 15 straight years of crushing liberals and mocking the Clintons. But Miller? In 2000, he was years away from touring the country with Bill O’Reilly and appearing weekly on Fox News’ The O’Reilly Factor.”

This is true. However, when Miller joined Al Michaels and Dan Fouts on Monday nights, he’d already made his political sympathies known. For example, in 1995, while talking to USA Today, the comedian stated, “On most issues, between Clinton and Newt Gingrich, I’d choose Newt in a second.”

Three years before that, in a New York Times interview, Miller called himself “essentially conservative” and said he’d pulled the lever for George H.W. Bush, not Michael Dukakis, the Democratic presidential candidate, in 1988.

Then there were his standup bits, his political riffs, delivered on stages and on his early-nineties HBO show, later enshrined in a best-selling 1996 book, The Rants.

“I’ve had it up to here with this PC shit!” Miller said to laughter on his show, a line printed verbatim in his book. He continued: “Why can’t we laugh at ourselves? Why, when a comedian does a joke on anything even vaguely controversial, do certain people moan like somebody let one rip during an audience with the Pope? I mean, come on… Who is responsible for that? Well, quite frankly, I’m pinning it on the gays.”

That last joke alone might doom his MNF chances today. (For the record, Miller, a self-declared libertarian, had this to say in 2004: “If two gay guys want to get married, it’s none of my business. I could care less. More power to them. I’m happy when people fall in love.” And in 2006, he stated to Penn Jillette, “I’m for gay marriage.”)

And even if Miller was able to win the gig, how long would he last, in the age of #MeToo, making jokes like this in the booth, “That receiver was as wide open as Annabel Chong!” Chong, you might remember, was a porn actress known for gang bangs.

The climate’s just too hot. Those five words right there can get you into an argument these days, whether the issue is our political culture or global temperatures.

Of course, when it comes to sports, there has long been friction fierce enough to send flames back and forth between professional athletics and society at large. Think of Jackie Robinson and Bill Russell on the race-relations front. And Muhammad Ali protesting the Vietnam War. And Billie Jean King striving for economic parity in women’s tennis.

But we’ve never quite seen a situation where dudes are not only burning their Nikes because of an ad campaign starring an unemployed quarterback, but one where a sitting U.S. president can get a pro sports superstar or even an entire sport in bad odor with millions of Americans simply by hitting the blue “Tweet” button on his phone.

And when it comes to conflagration potential, things are just as supercharged on the left side of the political divide. Thought experiment: Conjure an America exactly like today’s, with one exception. In this alternate reality, Rush Limbaugh hadn’t been hired by ESPN in 2003, and hadn’t resigned for remarks many construed as racist. Instead, the company announces Limbaugh will be in the booth for the 2019 version of Monday Night Football.

We know what would happen next. The Outrage Machine would overheat inside of three minutes. Screens on people’s phones would say, “Twitter is overcapacity” — partly because President Trump had already tweeted, “Now I can watch football again! Rush will be great!” By noon we’d be seeing images of protestors outside ESPN headquarters in Bristol, Connecticut.

Not to say our culture was chill back at century’s start. The Outrage Machine existed, but it didn’t have as many thundering turbines. It did rev up when Limbaugh made these comments on Countdown, about Philadelphia Eagles QB Donovan McNabb:

“I think the media has been very desirous that a black quarterback do well. They’re interested in black coaches and black quarterbacks doing well… He got a lot of credit for the performance of his team that he really didn’t deserve. The defense carried this team.”

But the machine wasn’t so strong that it could deny Dennis Miller — that brilliant, caustic, PC-destroying Pittsburgh native — the MNF job. That’s my Exhibit A. Exhibit B? A little bit of Monday Night Football trivia: Had Miller said no to the gig, it might have gone to Rush Limbaugh himself. Yup, he was a finalist, along with sportswriter Tony Kornheiser.

And for my last exhibit, I turn to baseball and Carlos Delgado. In 2004, to protest the Iraq War, Puerto Rico-born Delgado, a first baseman destined to slug 473 home runs before hanging up his cleats, decided to remain seated in the dugout during seventh-inning-stretch renditions of “God Bless America,” instead of standing with fellow Blue Jays, ball cap over heart. He did this for three months before anyone noticed. There was no uproar. There was no turning his protest into a political football.

When the New York Times contacted then-baseball commissioner Bud Selig, the guy who instituted this patriotic ritual after 9/11, asking for a Delgado comment, Selig didn’t know what the reporter was talking about. “You actually startled me,” he told the sportswriter.

Delgado continued his protest the rest of the season. The modest amount of media coverage that began in July did result in some fans booing him, and some sports-radio talkers suggested the slugger should “shut up and play.” But it didn’t go beyond that.

Two years later, the Mets signed him. The team asked Delgado to end his protest, and he agreed. His point was made. A minor controversy faded away.

Now it’s almost forgotten.

It would be different today.