At noon on Sunday, Corinthian Loyless, a 46-year-old pizza delivery driver from Hixson, Tennessee, was sitting on a bench in the pounding sun, buttoned up in a solid-black dress shirt, holding a bottle of pink Gatorade on top of his bald head. In the seat next to him were a folded suit jacket and an American flag wrapped around a wooden flagpole. He had been at State Farm Stadium since just after midnight, and as the sun broke through a blanket of morning clouds, he looked like a man flirting with heat stroke.

I bought an ice bottle of water from a vendor and returned to the bench. Hold this against your neck, I said. We started chatting. When I got his name, I told him I’d never met a person named Corinthian before.

“My grandmother named me that, for the chapter they used in the weddi

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