SEATTLE — The National Football League markets and manufactures controlled violence and mayhem better than any other league in the history of organized sports.

That is among the main reasons why football has become our national pastime. For better or for worse, the games frame the American ethos: big money, bright colors, big risks.

But do not discount the lure of the violence. NFL football in particular is a violent game, and every time it is played, players get hurt. Just look at Sunday’s conference championship games, in which a New England Patriots cornerback was the recipient of a hard hit that his coach later claimed was illegal and a San Francisco 49ers linebacker was carted off the field on a stretcher.

Normally, almost miraculously, most players are as resilient as LaMichael James, the 49ers’ punt and kick returner. James seemed to be severely injured in the second quarter on Sunday after he muffed a punt. As he attempted to locate the ball, Seattle’s Ricardo Lockette, with a 20-yard sprinting head start, leveled James, then appeared to rip James’ helmet off as they hit the ground. James eventually made it to his feet and was taken to San Francisco’s locker room.

He was back returning kicks in the third quarter.

Forty-five minutes after Sunday’s NFC game, in which Seattle held off San Francisco to advance to the Super Bowl, Patrick Willis, the 49ers’ rugged linebacker, appeared in the postgame interview room to answer questions. He was expansive, insightful, and surprisingly upbeat.

“I could sit up here and tell you what you want to hear,” he said. “Tell you that I’m angry, that I’m mad. But I’m not going to do that. I’m going to look at you and say: ‘You know what? It was a heck of a run.’ ”

Willis was particularly insightful when asked about NaVorro Bowman, a friend and fellow linebacker who suffered a career-threatening knee injury in the fourth quarter. Bowman was hurt after he stripped the ball from a Seattle receiver who was then pushed into Bowman’s left leg. Replays showed the gruesome nature of the injury, in which Bowman’s leg appeared to bend the wrong way, and also that he never let go of the fumble he had forced.

“When he couldn’t get up on his own, and I could hear him yelling, at that point in time I didn’t even care where the ball was,” Willis said later, turning on his compassion switch. “I was like: ‘Man, get out here and come help him. He’s hurting.’ ”

Willis said that as disappointed as he was about losing the game, losing his friend and colleague to a devastating injury hurt even more.

In an odd way, the outrage and awareness about NFL players’ safety have made those players more compassionate toward one another. Fans see it every week, when players kneel out of respect and concern when teammates and even opponents appear to be seriously injured, or when they offer a pat on the back after a particularly rough play, as if to say, “Nothing personal.”

“This game is huge,” Willis said. “No one is bigger than the game, but the bond that we share is so much deeper than the game we play. To see him (Bowman) go out that way — it’s not supposed to be like this. It’s not supposed to happen like this.”

Two months ago, I asked the former New York Giants player Lawrence Taylor, a Hall of Fame linebacker, about his sack of Washington Redskins quarterback Joe Theismann on Monday Night Football in 1985. Theismann’s leg was broken in two places on the play. Taylor said he was affected by the injury for the rest of that game, but that was the extent of it.

“It’s all part of the game,” he said. “At the time, I just hated to see it because Joe was on the bottom of the pile, yelling like a little girl, and I could just imagine for myself being at the bottom of the pile. You’re hurt, and everybody’s on top of you, and it seems like eternity for everybody to get off you.”

But Taylor also said he never considered changing his approach to football. He said he never watched film of the play, and that he never had a second’s worth of guilt. Asked whether he had compassion for injured players, he said: “This is a tough game. It’s not for everybody. It’s not for the faint of heart.”

Fans see injuries with so much regularity that they run the risk of becoming desensitized. The hits become like cartoon violence. This may one day catch up with football, and either put it out of business or relegate it to the margins of society.

But we are decades away from that.