Alex Smith knows how worried others are about his comeback. That won’t change his mind.

“I think the world of Alex, but I hope he doesn’t try to play again,” a former team employee who knows him well said the other day, saying out loud what others around the team have thought or whispered over the past year and a half.

Nobody knows how long this miracle can last, how much a gnarled leg with a titanium rod thrust up to the knee will hold the moment a football player crashes through the line. Watching Smith’s leg crumple the first time was hard enough. Knowing what he’s been through these past months, no one wants to see it happen again. What defensive player practicing beside him at this camp wants to deliver that first blow once Smith is cleared to face an active pass rush?

Over the past year, Smith has pushed to come back, defying every reasonable expectation for a man who almost lost his leg. The impression he’s probably left is one of someone so determined to prove success that he hasn’t contemplated disaster, that in his zeal to return he never considered what might happen when he’s tackled — that perhaps he had banned all horrific visions from his mind.

But on Wednesday, in his first news conference since Nov. 18, 2018, when Houston’s J.J. Watt and Kareem Jackson landed on top of him, snapping his leg, Smith admitted that he has considered everybody’s worries “more than I can probably say.”

He said he can’t “let that fear dictate my decision-making” before adding that “no doubt” the fear “is there.”

It was the most vulnerable Smith had been in his public appearances, even more than in the ESPN documentary detailing his recovery that has served as the official narrative of his past year and a half. He sat in an interview room at Washington’s facility, wearing a cap and staring into a screen where questions came virtually. Maybe it was the fact that he had already accomplished what nobody had considered reasonably achievable in being able to practice again, but for a few moments the invisible fence that usually blocks others from his true feelings had dropped, and he admitted doubt and uncertainty, saying he doesn’t know what comes next in his march to play once more.

Most portrayals of the time after the infections set in have focused on his defiant decision to save his leg, despite advice from his family and doctors who felt amputating it gave him a better chance to live. They detail his will to fight through an agonizing rehabilitation, they talk about his will, but they rarely mention the doubts that lingered around his persistence.

And yet, on Wednesday, Smith spoke about the“walls” he built inside his head those first six months as he struggled to process what had happened to him and accept his “new normal.” The walls were there for the months he sat in the wheelchair with the scaffolding around his leg, when he was inching forward in a walker and then hobbling on crutches. Finally, he admitted that these walls were not impenetrable and that behind the stoic facade of determination, there lurked the same uncertainty as everyone else about how this will work out.

Yes, Smith said, he understands how badly his comeback can end.

“Alex, you have to be able to protect yourself,” Washington Coach Ron Rivera said he told Smith in the two big conversations the men had before Rivera would allow him to return.

Rivera’s worry was everybody’s worry. The doctors had cleared Smith to practice. Medically, he was fine. But emotionally did the quarterback truly know the danger looming on the fields behind the team’s headquarters? Did he grasp the risks?

On Wednesday, Alex Smith conceded that he does indeed understand those risks and yet still he wants to go forward. Because ultimately, his comeback — and the fears that come with it — belong to him. Everyone else must watch and accept whatever happens, just as he already has.

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