Twenty-four teams. Two conferences.
One hero that knows which is yours.

Two failure modes are gated before anything renders. Transparency is load-bearing: the ESPN headshot has an alpha channel, MFL’s fallback JPG has a baked-in background that ruins the composite, so the gate requires an ESPN CDN URL — matched on the parsed host, never a substring, so a lookalike domain can’t slip a foreign image into an <img src>. And a team defense isn’t a person: position === ‘DEF’ is excluded, because a "DEF player" is a logo, not a face.

Because the hero leads with the viewer’s own conference, an NL owner would otherwise have no route to the AL board while the AL is actually drafting. So a live sibling conference attaches its board as a secondary link — resolved after the lead event is picked, because a view builder only sees its own event and cannot know the sibling’s live state.

Which hero shows is not a toggle — it is resolved from the calendar by resolveLeagueHeroState, on a priority ladder from P0 (an active event: draft day, the trade deadline, championship week) down to P5 (the default). Three phases have an identity of their own and render as composites; the rest render through the AFL’s branded promo card, which is also the fallback whenever no player can be cast. A missing feed degrades to the card that always worked, never to an empty flank.

Every picker is deterministic per Pacific-Time calendar day: the page is server-rendered, so Math.random() at request time would make two loads disagree and the cache useless. A hash of the PT day-key plus a per-hero seed indexes into the sorted candidate pool — stable all day, rotating at midnight PT so one face doesn’t own the window. ?testDate=YYYY-MM-DD drives both the phase and the rotation, so any day’s hero can be previewed on demand.

The treatment is not reimplemented here. Seven forked hero components — five spotlights and two panel boards, about three thousand lines under seven CSS prefixes — were unified into one spotlight shell and one panel board. Every dimension that genuinely differed between them became a custom property; every palette became a named accent. The AFL’s keeper and draft heroes are configurations of that shell, which is why they arrived with light mode, dark mode, mobile behaviour and a 404 fallback already correct.

The accents are named per hero rather than per colour, and that is deliberate: three of TheLeague’s five were shades of blue that differ in accent, pill and dark surface, and folding them together on the way in restyled live heroes. The AFL adds two more — navy and gold — plus the shared red urgency tone that the cut watch, the keeper deadline and a live draft all reach for.