Raider Nation was its usual eclectic self for the season opener in Las Vegas on Monday, with some fans going with a Captain Jack Sparrow-meets-darth Vader vibe that nicely complemented the team’s new $1.9 billion “Death Star” stadium.

One fan caught my eye because while he was dressed like middle management, the Chucky doll he was carrying — a tribute to coach Jon Gruden — was in Raiders gear head to toe.

Anyway, I guess because there was so much color from all around to soak in, it felt strange not seeing a rainbow, given the moment.

The lack of hoopla during the preseason was a pretty good hint that the first game for the Raiders’ Carl Nassib, the NFL’S first openly gay player, wasn’t going to be treated as a momentous occasion. Certainly nowhere near fanfare the NBA’S Jason Collins received in 2013 when he became the first openly gay active player in any of the big four sports leagues.

Still, while no one expected a parade, the death of this NFL bogeyman warranted a bigger funeral. But I didn’t see anything in the stadium adorned with pride-related paraphernalia to mark the presence of Nassib, who posted a video on Instagram in June sharing that he was gay.

Now, he may have wanted it that way, and good on him. I just don’t want people to start acting like it wasn’t as recently as 2018 that at least one team was asking prospects about their sexual orientation during the draft combine, presumably to avoid drafting gays. Men like Dave Kopay and Wade Davis waited until retirement to come out. Fear of being targeted kept Esera Tuaolo quiet until he called it quits. California Supreme Court Justice Martin Jenkins, who briefly played for the Seattle Seahawks in the 1970s, didn’t come out until last year.

The NFL is more than 100 years old. That’s a century of compartmentalizing. Of fearing you might lose your job for being gay or bisexual.

One week in June, Nassib comes out. The next week, the NFL declares “football is gay,” and suddenly what was once thought of as impossible was made fairly pedestrian.

In one Raiders video, Nassib was featured early, which felt like the organization’s way of acknowledging the history without the emphasis Michael Sam received when he became the first openly gay man to be drafted in 2014.

Seeing it downplayed, a part of me felt gaslighted. If a person didn’t know better, they could imagine that Nassib was the first openly gay man good enough to play in the league, when in fact the league had a culture that purposefully kept out gay men.

Acknowledging Nassib wouldn’t have been solely about him being first; it also would acknowledge all the men who made it possible for him by coming out in retirement and chipping away at the barriers.

My hope is that seeing Nassib strip the ball, setting up the game-winning touchdown, was acknowledgment enough for some of the people Nassib referred to who helped before him. People who played in fear because for the first 100 years the NFL wasn’t gay.

At least Kopay and company have memory of Nassib being the hero in his first game as an openly gay player.

“I’m really happy that we got the win on the day that kind of made a little bit of history,” Nassib said.

But we know it wasn’t just a little bit of history. Not if it took more than 100 years.