Team captain stops championship soccer match for 22 minutes to perform emergency CPR on a seagull

Not all heroes wear capes. Some wear soccer cleats.

We can't be the only ones who thought all professional sports players were… how do we say this nicely, narcissistic? Self-centered? Less empathic than the rest of us? Maybe that's completely unfair of us to assume, but because we only see them on the TV screen or caught in the middle of some sort of scandal, they somehow seem less human than the rest of us. Not necessarily in a bad way, but in the same way that you think Brad Pitt also isn't really a human. He's a celebrity, and the truth is that they live completely different lives than you or we do. They face completely different problems in the world that we can't really relate to.

But it turns out that some soccer players do have a heart, and it was shown with perfect clarity in yesterday's soccer (or football, if you're reading this from outside the US), match in Turkey when a seagull was struck by a soccer ball and fell headfirst onto the pitch. The seagull didn't respond, but the team captain did. He immediately rushed over and started performing life-saving CPR on this seagull, which brought the bird back to consciousness. The bird was later treated for a wing injury.

If any of you here actually care about soccer, the team that saved the bird actually lost the match. They may not have been champions, but they walked away as heroes.