The NFL returns on Thursday night with the annual Hall of Fame Game in Canton, Ohio, where the Arizona Cardinals and Carolina Panthers will begin the 2026 preseason by playing a game of enormous ceremonial importance and almost no predictive value.

It is football, unquestionably. There will be helmets, punts, third-and-long situations and commentators saying that a young player has made the most of his opportunity. What it will not reliably reveal is whether either team is good, because that information has been placed somewhere safe until September.

The Hall of Fame Game exists to announce that the NFL is back. This is a large cultural service. For several months, supporters have been forced to interpret minicamp clips, depth-chart updates and photographs of quarterbacks arriving at facilities in a hat. A real score will now be available, even if everyone sensible agrees not to draw conclusions from it.

Carolina and Arizona were selected because their histories are connected to the Hall of Fame Class of 2026. Larry Fitzgerald will be enshrined after a career spent making the Cardinals look organised at very difficult moments. Luke Kuechly, one of the defining Panthers defenders of his era, will join him in Canton alongside Drew Brees, Roger Craig and Adam Vinatieri.

That is the serious part of the weekend. The game is its more peculiar companion: a nationally televised exhibition in which coaches attempt to avoid injury, veterans attempt to avoid excessive exertion and undrafted rookies attempt to make the sort of tackle that causes their name to be mentioned on a broadcast for the first time.

The starters may appear briefly, if at all. Quarterbacks will wear caps with purpose. Established players will watch from the sideline in the manner of men who have just been asked to inspect a construction project they are not personally responsible for. The meaningful decisions will arrive later, after several weeks of training camp and considerably more tape than anyone should willingly consume in August.

Still, the Hall of Fame Game has its uses. It gives the league’s newest players a stage, gives fans a reason to check whether the television still remembers their subscription and gives every team not involved the opportunity to tell itself that its own preseason plan is more dignified.

The extra exhibition also creates an old annual tension for the two participants. One side will inevitably give a little more playing time to someone who has looked good in practice. The other will spend the following week explaining that the player is fine, the issue is minor and the phrase ‘out of an abundance of caution’ remains one of the most flexible expressions in the English language.

None of that should diminish the occasion. Canton is where the sport preserves the people who made its past worth remembering. The game beside the museum is a useful reminder that the present is always trying to audition for that company, even when it is being played by a third-string cornerback wearing No. 47.

By Friday morning, one team will be 1-0 in preseason and the other will be 0-1. Both records will mean almost nothing. This will not stop the winning side’s supporters from locating a pathway to the Super Bowl, or the losing side’s supporters from asking whether a coaching change should be considered before breakfast.

Football is back. The evidence will be incomplete, the sample size will be absurd and the overreaction will be entirely traditional.