Why do we watch the Super Bowl?

You don’t have to care about either of the two teams playing to watch the Super Bowl. You don’t have to even care about football itself to watch the Super Bowl.

What does the Super Bowl do for us?

1. It gives us a reason to get together with our friends.

2. It gives us a reason to cook and eat nutritionally incorrect food, food that is salty and greasy and fatty and tasty.

3. It gives us commercials to laugh at and talk about later.

4. If you’re a gambling person, it gives you something else to bet on.

5. If you go to work on Monday, it gives you something to talk about with your co-workers.

6. And, of course, it gives us a reason to drink intoxicating beverages.

Of course, any given NHL or NBA game from now until the playoffs can fulfill these same purposes. But it’s the NFL’s final game of the season that makes our “Super” day.

Do we really love watching oversized men knock each other down? Maybe we have loved that since we walked on two legs.

I am hardly a football fan (the above graphic notwithstanding), but I will be watching with Two Dogs and friends. I will probably be eating nutritionally incorrect foods and drinking intoxicating beverages (not too much!).

I will take advantage of this temporary distraction from regular life – life which can be worrisome and stressful and dull – and I will probably talk about it later.

I will most likely forget the details about the game, but not the food and the fellowship and the commercials.

I will probably do it again next year.