Folks, the Hayne Plane has flown. Down the runway, up into the air and away into the clouds. What began as a shocking announcement soon evolved into one of the biggest stories in Australian sports as Hayne went from dreamer to 49er to pre-season breakout to active roster member. And then he was waived. But then he was back on the practice squad and would find his way onto the field again before the season was over and going into his second year he was poised for another shot at something special.

Jarryd Hayne: “I am retiring from the NFL because the Fiji Rugby Sevens team reached out to me about the opportunity to join the team for the upcoming Olympics, and I simply could not pass that chance up. The Olympics has been something I have admired since I was a little boy, and it is an opportunity I feel very similar to me joining the NFL.”

Fair to say that this came as a complete surprise. Hayne had just been through the first six weeks of the Niners’ offseason schedule. Amidst the 23 incoming players via the draft and undrafted free agency, just a single one was a running back (6th round pick Kelvin Taylor) and that left them with six running backs on their current 90-man pre-season roster (which can be changed at any time but doesn’t need to be trimmed for three months). RB Kendall Gaskins was one of those released to make room for the additions… Jarryd Hayne was not.

So while there was plenty of change going on within Niners Nation, what with Chip Kelly taking over as head coach, the quarterback battle going on and the general unease of coming off a five-win season, it certainly seemed that Hayne was well in contention for year two. Coach Kelly’s outside-the-box thinking seemed perfect for a player with JH’s skill set. Just a month ago he was firmly swatting away the idea that he was on his way back to Australia.

If there’s one major frustration from this whole thing it’s the way that the Aussie tabloid media did their best to ruin a wonderful story that they never really understood. The NFL was a foreign concept to most of them so, while Hayne will have been immune to all of this within the American fishbowl, the entire duration of his gridiron career was countered with constant rumours that he was about to quit. Usually to return to the NRL. Usually to the Sydney Roosters. Sadly the trolls will now feel pretty justified – which is like cheering when that broken clock is right twice a day.

For example, note some of the headlines that you stumble upon with a quick twitter search:

• 49ers.com (USA): Jarryd Hayne Announces Retirement from the NFL
• Daily Telegraph (AUS): Hayne quits NFL for Olympic dream
• Bleacher Report (USA): Jarryd Hayne is retiring from the NFL to chase Olympic gold with the Fiji Rugby Sevens team
• The Australian (AUS): Jarryd Hayne quits NFL
• Mercury News (USA): Jarryd Hayne retires from 49ers, joins Fiji’s rugby team for Olympics
• ABC News (AUS): Hayne turns back on NFL to chase Olympic dream with Fiji sevens

You get the idea. Those are just a select few but for the most part they’re indicative of the larger trend.

49ers GM Trent Baalke: “We would like to thank Jarryd for his contributions to the San Francisco 49ers organization and our community over the last year. Jarryd is a tremendous example of what can happen when you commit to a goal and do everything in your power to make it a reality. He earned the right to wear a 49ers uniform and compete alongside the best in the game. We fully support Jarryd’s decision to pursue another dream - representing the Fiji Rugby Sevens team in this summer’s Olympic games. We look forward to watching him in Rio and wish him continued success.”

The cynical view is to wonder if maybe he saw the writing on the wall in a tough running back battle between Carlos Hyde, Mike Davis, Kelvin Taylor, Shaun Draughn, DuJuan Harris and himself. Hayne presumably had every chance of making it from that group but playing time behind a healthy Carlos Hyde was going to be slim. Playing for a rebuilding team probably wasn’t such a problem for Hayne after his Parramatta Eels days and also given his personal triumph in making it this far, but even with that the Fijian Sevens team offered Hayne the chance of Olympic glory. Some of the finest New Zealand rugby players are going down the same route, including Hayne’s old NRL opponent Sonny Bill Williams. Rugby Sevens is at the Olympics. Don't think for a second that players don't care about that.

Especially the Fijians, who have never won an Olympic medal in their history and yet will go into Rio 2016 with a massive chance of not only making the podium but winning the entire thing. If the current Sevens World Series standings are to be trusted then they should enter as favourites.

Hayne won’t necessarily make that team but he’s not averse to taking the odd risk. He probably feels like he can’t hardly fail after his whirlwind NFL career, which isn’t necessarily a perfect mind-set. We've seen plenty of players going from rugby to rugby league with differing results and Sevens is still a watered down version of rugby so that transition shouldn't be out of Hayne's abilities, even if he might need to make a few adaptations after maximising his physical fitness for the short-burst, high-impact world of the NFL. Sevens is 14 minutes of near-constant sprinting, that ain't easy. Despite the unexpected nature of this announcement, Hayne will not have made his decision lightly.

In dropping the NRL for the NFL, what Hayne did was pretty much unprecedented. However in dropping the NFL for Sevens at the Olympics, he follows the trend of American Nate Ebner who in March left the New England Patriots – with whom he’d won a Super Bowl – to join the USA Sevens team and he’s been chugging away on the world tour since then. Ebner, however, goes with the agreement that he will return to the Patriots after the Olympics – or before should he miss the cut.

It doesn’t look like Jarryd Hayne has any such deal in place. Ebner was a valued special teams contributor, Hayne is a role player in a very deep and disposable position. The fact that he has ‘retired’ more or less guarantees that he won’t be back in the National Football League and that opens up a can of worms as to what he does after the Olympics. Sonny Bill is expected to jump straight back into the All Blacks, with the chances being that he’ll extend his NZRU contract for another year with a shot at the British & Irish Lions on the cards. Hayne, you have to assume, will be back in the NRL where he'll no doubt settle right back into his old superstar status. 

Which leaves his short, sharp time in the NFL in focus. The 2015 pre-season was such a fairy tale as he finished it with the second-most rush yards in all of the NFL. Given that regular starters don’t even play until midway through the pre-season, those numbers were taken way out of context but just in making the 53-man active roster at all he’d beaten most odds. Getting on the field in that season opener must have been an unparalleled feeling… a feeling that flipped 180 when he fumbled his first touch.

There were ups and there were downs, a few promising runs and the odd naïve mistake. Mostly there was a lot of waiting and on a struggling team with a struggling coach (who’d be sacked after his first season), there wasn’t too much room for gambling on a raw, Aussie talent with less than 12 months of gridiron experience. As an individual player, it was hard to judge his numbers as successful or not given the confusing opportunities he was given/not given. His second season would have been so interesting, one way or another, as we got to see the athlete that he always was combined with the experience that he didn't previously have. Maybe that player wouldn't have even made the roster on Kelly's Niners. Maybe he would have really thrived. We'll never know now.

But the real story of Jarryd Hayne’s NFL career was that of a player at the top of one sport who soared into the highest level of another pretty much on the wings of his own faith and natural talent. The Hayne Plane was a fascinating experiment in pub banter. How would Jonah Lomu have gone in the NFL? Could David Warner have made it as a baseballer? What about LeBron James on the rugby field? On 99.9% of hypothetical situations the answer is: absolutely not, no way. If it takes an athlete their whole life to get to the professional level in one sport it’s pretty incomprehensible to think that you could just jump over to another and master that one in a tiny fraction of the time. Even between very similar sports there are skills that simply don’t translate.

And yet Jarryd Hayne did it. He cracked the NFL. After a challenging first season it’s just a pity we won’t get to see what he could have been had he only stuck around a little longer.