Super What?

As I write this, it's 3:15 in the morning and I've been up about a half hour. I don't know who won the Super Bowl. I didn't watch it in great part because I go to sleep early, and that includes Sundays. It's just the sleep pattern I've chosen. Doctors say you should adopt and keep a definite sleep schedule, and early to bed, early to rise works best for me.

Still, in trolling Facebook for most of this half hour since rising, there was nothing I saw about the game itself but a lot - a tremendous, absurd, lot - about the halftime show. And quite a bit about the food and drinks folks were consuming. And gripes about the commercials. But not one thing about the game. None of my friends who posted (well, to be fair, of the three dozen or so who came up in my feed) said anything about football, but were analyzing the Hell out of everything else involved.

What does that tell me? That it ain't about football by and large but about the party. It's not about the game but the event. I'm not calling that wrong, for the record (although the excess is disconcerting on several levels), but a symptom of a long held belief of mine. The Super Bowl isn't really about football. It's about the party. 

Again, that might be all right, so far as it goes. But it's no real indicator about how popular football might be any more than Christmas excess validates Christianity. I doubt that most anyone outside KC or Philly really cared about the actual outcome of the actual game. Or, at least, their interest was only, ha, ha, in passing.