Spare a Christmas wish for the 30-somethings suiting up on the gridiron Wednesday afternoon.

Wish them loose hamstrings and limber joints. Wish for their Saturday bruises to be on the mend. Wish for them, like Ebenezer Scrooge, to get a glimpse of Christmas past and feel what it’s like to be young again.

Wish them the best. Because the NFL couldn’t care less.

At 33, linebacker Kyle Van Noy is enjoying a career season, his first with 10.5 sacks. A guy who came to the Baltimore Ravens last season seemingly on the tail end of his career is now shockingly in his prime as a pass rusher. He hopes to keep it up Wednesday against the Houston Texans, but playing his third game in 11 days isn’t going to make it easy — especially just four days removed from a bruising game against the Pittsburgh Steelers.

“Yeah, it sucks,” Van Noy said Monday. “Just gotta get all the way ready, man. [I’ve] been just like the other folks that have complained about it. I’m the same way. But gotta do business.”

Business is the reason Van Noy and the Ravens are in this crunch. It turns out the NFL’s care for player safety can be bought. The price is $150 million.

That’s the cash Netflix laid out for a marquee Christmas Day slate that will see Ravens-Texans and Chiefs-Steelers on the streaming giant for the first time. Record millions, too, are expected to watch — assuming, of course, that the streaming platform’s servers don’t struggle like they did a few months ago for the titanically disappointing Jake Paul-Mike Tyson fight.

There’s a possibility that the elusive Lamar Jackson will be even more difficult to spot if he’s reduced to a splotchy cluster of pixels on your TV screen.

But I digress. The biggest problem with the Christmas Day slate is not necessarily the streaming quality (which is an issue) or the Ravens spending time away from their families for the second straight year (which is an issue), but the tight turnaround for four teams that all figure into the postseason picture.

The Ravens, Texans, Chiefs and Steelers all have back-to-back short weeks that stretch the definition of “recovery” for an incredibly violent sport, the body trauma of which is often compared to car collisions. Players squeeze an awful lot of recovery time into a week, and when the timeline is condensed, so is the healing.

“Everything’s gotta be sped up a little bit,” Ronnie Stanley said. “We gotta schedule things and some because we don’t really get a true off-day. All the body work and things of that nature has to be kind of fit in and bunched together.”

For Stanley, a 30-year-old who has managed to avoid serious injury this year, there are certain nonnegotiables. He has to get enough sleep, and he has to mix in sauna and cold tub time. He has to hit the training table to work out all the creaks and aches that football invites.

All that physical maintenance doesn’t even get into the practice time, film study and mental reps players need to be their best on Sundays. When the games get moved to Wednesday, well, how can players be their best?

When asked if he “likes” playing on Christmas, Stanley’s eyes danced toward the ceiling during a long pause before he answered: “Sure. I don’t dislike it.”

Stanley went on to call it “an honor” to play football on a holiday. But it has less to do with honor than profit, which motivates the NFL to look past its hollow vows to make player safety paramount. In what world is it savvy for safety and well-being to follow five “recovery” days between games with just three days between games?

Slap those two short weeks together, and it’s not the most wonderful time of the year.

The Ravens are probably in better shape than their AFC counterparts, with a recent bye helping prepare them for the rigors of a stretch that none of these players have seen before. Still, an NFL season takes its toll, which is why Justice Hill, Zay Flowers, Daniel Faalele and Nelson Agholor were all not practicing on Monday. You hope that the walking wounded of the team rally for game time, but the scheduling certainly doesn’t give everyone the best possible chance.

With the audience that’s projected to watch these Christmas Day games, you’d think the NFL would want its best, most healthy product on the field — one of the reasons NBA teams, which have played on Christmas for decades, never play the day before.

But these NFL teams were “gifted” a Saturday game instead of Sunday in Week 16, giving them one more day of “rest” before playing on Wednesday, arguably the weirdest day of the week to play football in the first place.

To paraphrase Van Noy, it stinks. But it’s business. Which as ever, is the only thing the NFL cares about. The bottom line is king. Whether the game is as compelling or as safe as it could be is secondary.

The players aren’t thrilled — they won’t even be able to poke their heads out of the locker room to watch Beyoncé at halftime. But they’ll do what they have to do, given the stakes of the game.

“I think we know what it is,” Van Noy said. “And we’re just gonna play the game and try to win.”

Given the circumstances, the opportunity to play on the big stage feels more like a lump of coal than a gift.