Note: The following story contains spoilers from Episode 10 of “American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez.”

Over the course of its 10 episodes, “History of American Sports” chronicled three murders, a gruesome gunshot wound, Aaron Hernandez’s growing drug problem, and several other heartbreaking scenes. Yet perhaps the most shocking moment of all occurs in the final moments of episode 10.

Instead of detailing another grisly scene, the FX drama ends with Jaylen Barron’s Shayanna watching a group of kids play soccer. The more she watches them play, the more her smile disappears as the weight of Aaron’s (Josh Andrés Rivera) creeps into her mind.

For series developer and executive producer Stu Zicherman, the question of how to end the series has always been difficult. “I didn’t want to end up in prison with Aaron. It was so sad,” Zicherman told TheWrap. “We wanted to find a way to show this idea that the game goes on and people like Aaron – and there are other players in the history of the game – are just forgotten. What happens is forgotten.

Zicherman added that his own 12-year-old son plays soccer and dreams of playing the game later in life. “It’s become America’s pastime,” he said. “And the game has never been bigger.”

It’s a hard truth to swallow because “American Sports Story” is as much about the crimes committed by Hernandez as it is about the pressures and consequences of the football industrial complex. The 10-episode series that includes Ryan Murphy, Nina Jacobson, Brad Simpson and Alexis Martin Woodall among its many executive producers never makes excuses for the late Hernandez. It shows him murdering Odin Lloyd and recounts the resulting trial. The series also depicts Hernandez murdering Daniel de Abreu and Safiro Furtado – the double homicide of which the real player was acquitted – and shooting his friend Alexander Bradley.

Piece by piece, the drama examines Hernandez’s hairpin temperament, internalized homophobia, and difficult childhood, arguing that these factors led to the tragic events that would later define his life and death. But above all in its last episode, the series also focuses on football itself. As conflicting as it was, the pressures of fame and the blunt trauma of the sport never helped. Posthumously, the real Hernández was diagnosed with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a revelation that led to theories about how the illness might have affected his behavior.

“I want people to forget the tragedy of it all,” Zicherman said. “He wasn’t born a killer. Without forgiving him for what he did, it’s a tragedy.

To highlight the complexity of this story, Zicherman and his team chose to use clips of real sportscasters reacting to Hernandez’s CTE diagnosis. The news only came out after Hernandez’s suicide, when researchers at Boston University studied Hernandez’s brain and found he was in stage 3 or 4. The progressive degenerative disease affects people who have suffered repeated concussions and has been linked to cognitive, behavioral and emotional problems. .

“Head injuries played out in a very interesting way in real life. It really became a debate, whereas in our whole show there wasn’t a lot of debate about whether Aaron killed these men, what he did or who he was,” explained Zicherman.

Originally the plan was to write and cast actors for this edit, but that didn’t fully capture the importance of this particular issue. “The reason we decided to use real voices is because, in the world of sports, they are very famous voices. They are the experts. It’s the chorus of people constantly commenting,” he continued. “It remains a huge debate within football today: what are the dangers of playing? We thought it would add more resonance if we used real people.

When searching for clips, Zicherman said the exercise was “powerful.” He discovered experts for and against Hernández as well as several who used the player’s death to talk about violence in soccer as a whole. But this cacophony of debate is ultimately the focal point of this entire show.

“It doesn’t matter. We’re addicted to this game. We’re going to continue to watch it no matter what,” Zicherman said. “So we just wanted to put a stamp on it.”

As of now, “American Sports Story” has not been renewed for a second season. But if it gets the green light, Zicherman and the production team have started talking about other stories in the sports world that can “live up to” this one.

“The big idea is a story, whether it’s a crime, an event or a person, that transcends sport so much that it makes a broader comment on society in general, which I think this show was capable of doing,” Zicherman said. “There were discussions. I think everyone is waiting to see how this one performs.