We lie. All the time. We lie to cover our mistakes. We lie to make ourselves look or feel better. We lie. Even when we should know better, we lie anyway. But worse than the simple lies or the squirm-out-of-personal-trouble lies, is the lie we write down for posterity because admitting the truth would be like bumping a table and watching a whole lot of dominoes fall down.

And for some reason, we all pretend like the lie was worth it.

There are the obvious ones that are there to avoid lawsuits, like the NFL and concussions. There are those we don’t want to disentangle on a massive scale, like the 2000 presidential election. And then there are the lies we tell so that everybody else feels OK with one girl’s devestating injury. The official report of Jenna Privette’s injury during a high school hockey game was that

“She was not contacted illegally, did not fall into the boards and did not appear to fall awkwardly to the ice,” the report said. The official said he checked with his partner, the linesman, the EMT on staff and the school athletic director, and “everyone agreed that the player appeared to fall unaided.”

This of course is the lie. She was checked in the back. Video, which is no longer available seemed to confirm this. The mother’s response is most damaging:

“You don’t get paralyzed from falling. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure it out,” Penny Privette, Jenna Privette’s mother, told the Star Tribune. “We’re losing the sight of what’s most important. We know what we know. We know what … we saw. … I’m not going to get into a big war over stuff when I have my daughter sitting here in a hospital bed.”

The only conclusion I can come to is that this lie is there to protect the player who made an illegal check and the athletic conference from litigation. Or perhaps the lie is there to protect “the integrity of the sport” from “wimps” who might want to change it.  In either case, the lie serves to protect all of these other people who didn’t get hurt. But it also serves to imprison the athlete who does.  In this case, a truly physical imprisonment in the form of paralysis (though her doctor is optimistic of her recovery) and the social one of ostracization. Since she “fell down” it must be her fault and that she is a bad player. The league said so.

Really, I am pretty tolerant of how much the truth may be stretched while still resembling itself. But there are two things I don’t abide. 1) An institution lying on a public record to cover its own back and 2) when the lie allows a perpetrator to go unpunished and a victim disabled and with virtually no recourse. That is just evil. Then again, I expect nothing less from a climate in which we speak of “untruths” and “misrememberings” rather than what they really are: lies.

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• Jack Jablonski, Jenna Privette Stories Should Scare Us All (sbnation.com)