Do you know how much this hurts?

Do you have any idea?

At this point in an NFL season, after months of collisions and violence and pills and pain-killers, the body is several steps beyond weary. Just getting up and out of bed on a Monday morning by itself is an exercise in strength and will and overcoming. It is why NFL teams have Tuesday off instead of Mondays. Coaches want the healing blood to start circulating after another savage Sunday game, with at least some light activity, and know their broken players might just remain in bed on Mondays if given the option.

That's part of what makes what happened in a little arena at Florida International University on Monday morning so moving. From all over the National Football League, from as far away as Arizona and Chicago and Washington and Minnesota, former University of Miami players packed their best clothes and dragged their limping bodies to airplanes so they could laugh and cry and support and remember and mourn their late friend one last time.

A team huddle, again and forever, this time grieving around a casket.

''Family'' is a tired sports cliché, but they live it at UM in a way that is uncommon and lasting. It is why all the expensive sports cars of NFL stars convoy through the impoverished town of Immokalee every year, to support Edgerrin James' charity. It is why Steve Walsh and Bernie Kosar are always calling the new UM quarterback, any UM quarterback, to hand-me-down their help. And it is why Hall of Famer Michael Irvin would cold-call his old dorm-room telephone number to motivate whomever the new Hurricane was who might have had the good fortune of picking up that phone.

To a man, old Hurricanes will tell you that the NFL, the alleged destination, is a cold business compared to the warmth they left behind on a campus in Coral Gables. Maybe it is because UM represented a younger and more innocent time in their lives, back when they still viewed the world through a child's eyes.

Maybe it is the bond of family they felt growing while they grew in that tight of a huddle. Or maybe, as is the case with defensive tackle Vince Wilfork, who lost both his parents a few months apart while in school, that huddle sometimes felt like the only thing holding his life together.

GROWING UP QUICKLY

Regardless, even stars like Ray Lewis and Santana Moss and Wilfork say they regret leaving UM early for the millions in the pros, even though cashing in was always supposed to be the original goal when they got on campus. They feel like they sold a year of their childhood. And they'll come back to get close to it any chance they get, even if it is to grieve.

Friends, they say, are the family you choose. UM's football program is a proud and dysfunctional and misunderstood and funny and excellent family, and it is our proud and dysfunctional and misunderstood and funny and excellent family. And there is a lifetime bond strengthened in the us-against-the-world you'll find in their huddle.

You are reminded of it at the top of sports and at the bottom of despair. You are reminded of it in swaying stadiums filled with life and around a single casket surrounded by death. And you were reminded of it again Monday, amid soft piano music and heartbreaking song, as the past three UM football coaches -- Larry Coker, Randy Shannon and Butch Davis -- gathered in the front row before a casket to greet and hug and mourn and share after the largest kind of loss.

RANGE OF EMOTIONS

What do you find in even the best families? Laughter. Tears. Support. Sharing. Pain. Dysfunction. Love. Above all, love. It was all on display as Monday morning stretched into afternoon. Sean Taylor was one of the siblings who represented this school in everything from recklessness to excellence. So, as his image played in slow-motion on two big screens, the audience remembered and defended him, applauding when the media was castigated out loud for making reckless presumptions about his demise.

It is what the most united families do -- protect their own.

Rest in peace, Sean.

You were a Hurricane to the very end -- and beyond.

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