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A high school football team is an unlikely flash point for a national crisis, but before the Massapequa Chiefs can take on their traditional rivals in Farmingdale, East Meadow or Westbury, they have to take on a much tougher team with a much bigger roster (but much worse running skills): the New York State Department of Education.

The Long Island team ran afoul of a movement by New York Democrats, the worst team in the state which long ago rigged all the games in its favor, to ban Indian team names. After their out-of-state counterparts took out the Cleveland Indians and the Washington Redskins, the New York Democrats have come for the Massapequa Chiefs.

The Massapequa Chiefs have been accused of being offensive. But whom are they offending? The Massapequa have disappeared and members of other tribes are speaking for them. All the media could find to object to the high school football team was a local professor from a tribe whose old territory was 400 miles away

What’s offensive about the Massapequa Chiefs? The most common objection is that the mascot wears a headdress and none of the local tribes ever wore headdresses. But inaccurate is a long way from being offensive. The average sports mascot is as accurate as the Stanford Tree or the West Virginia Mountaineer, but after President Trump intervened on behalf of the Massapequa Chiefs, pitting the national Department of Education against New York’s version, the media came after the entire town.

The AP penned purple prose about “Massapequa’s grim legacy of violence against Native Americans” and described the town as being “the site of a massacre in which scores of native men, women and children were killed by Europeans in the 1600s.”

As per usual for the Associated Press almost nothing in those sentences is true.

Fort Massapeag was actually a Dutch fort that the colonists built for their Indian allies to serve as a bulwark against the English, but even that is mostly guesswork and no one is sure. The massacre has long since been dismissed as a legend. The New York Times noted that “most archaeologists and historians discount legends” of a massacre.  An attack on an Indian town often cited to indict Massapequa likely took place in Queens, President Trump’s old neighborhood, by the orders of the old Dutch government.

But the graphic myths of a massacre that left the earth “tinged with a reddish cast, which the old people said was occasioned by the blood of the Indians” lingered.

Legends of dead Indians persisted in the area and led to the Amityville Horror and the house built on an imaginary Indian burial ground in nearby Amityville.  The Matouwac Research Center, claiming to uncover the story of Long Island’s Indian history, argued that the massacre of the Massapequa “became the basis for the Amityville Horror House legend.” That’s just as imaginary as the rest of the Amityville backstory.

(Amityville sports teams, which used to be known as the Warriors, were forced to change their names to the Hawks because the only warriors in history were Indians. That name change will last only long enough for someone to discover the existence of Black Hawk.)

The legends of Indian burial grounds and the Indian themed sports teams all come from the same romantic impulse of developers and newly arrived suburbanites creating an identity for the emerging New York City bedroom communities in the area. Few people lived in Massapequa until well-connected Irish lawyers with an insider tip about the direction of a highway bought it up, invented a village, appointed themselves to public offices and dotted it with ‘Indian’ references to give charm to their Tudor kit houses.

The Irish, Jewish, Italian and other New York City middle class residents who moved out here came to believe the legends, but they’re based on very little history and less archeology. Very little was preserved in the area so that no one really knows where the places referred to in the records are located. Stories of battles and massacres are even more dubious and mostly useful for inventing ghost stories for local kids to shiver to.

But in the woke age, the myths have been broken up and are on a collision course. Woke activists use the legends of battles that never happened to demand the end of sports teams based on fictional Indians.

“There was no tribe east of the Mississippi that ever wore a headdress — ever,” the AP quotes an Indian activist from the  Chickasaw Nation in Oklahoma who was raised by white parents.

The headdresses are as imaginary as the rest of the local Indian backstory. Activists and suburbanites are just embracing different parts of the legends. History easily becomes legend, but the problem is that one side is trying to bully the other out of its bad history by using more bad history.

Massapequa really ought to have been named after three shady lawyers, but they might not have made as good mascots. The local residents want to feel connected to something more than real estate developers. Teams named Chiefs or Warriors are not a show of disdain, but a genuine part of the area’s identity.

That the identity is made up of myths is a technicality when the other side is busy pretending that the Amityville Horror was inspired by an equally mythical massacre.

The question is not what’s true, but what do the identities we choose mean to us?

Massapequa residents like feeling connected to a semi-mythical pre-American past, but, like most Americans they don’t want to endlessly litigate that history, they want to celebrate being part of an area with a strange and wonderful (and maybe cursed) past.

The campaign against Indian team names is embraced by professional victims who want to control a history that is almost as fake without admitting that’s what they’re after. Some of the most visibly aggressive Indian activists were exposed as frauds, like Sen. Elizabeth Warren, white people appropriating Indian identity to score political points.

But perhaps they, like the people of Massapequa, also liked being part of a myth.