Will the three people in this country who actually give a damn about the Super Bowl please raise your hand? (Aside from you, Rick. We've already made fun of you.)

As far as I can tell, this 'national championship game' is a beautifully transparent excuse for the following things:

• Strange hats.
• Beer.
• Chips and dip.
• Very expensive commercials.
• Beer.
• Beer.
• Shania Twain in a rhinestone bustier.

It has surprisingly little to do with professional football. This is a good thing, because let's face it: most Super Bowls are pretty lousy excuses for football games. That's doubly insulting, given that American professional football appears to consist of neckless humans, hormonally altered to the size of refrigerators, lumbering around in garish amounts of padding in order to prevent death or injury from being tackled by the other refrigerator-sized humans lumbering around the field.

My theory: American football would be far more interesting if players were not wearing the equivalent of full-body armor. Unpadded, unprotected players have far more impetus to be quick, nimble runners—because every hit would actually have the potential to hurt. With the threat of pain, paralysis, or a neck-snapping death taken away, the only alternative is to continually breed larger and larger mutant linebackers, whose sole purpose in life is to be very large, stand very still, and prevent any other player from actually moving.

Watching refrigerator-sized mutants grunting and slamming into each other makes for an excruciatingly uninteresting game. No wonder we all eat eighteen pounds of cheez-its in the first quarter. It alleviates the boredom.

The teams have developed an interesting tactic for televised games, and sadly, it seems to be working. Since they seem to understand that the fridge-on-fridge game that they're playing bores the audience to extreme obesity, they take great pains to play little as possible over the course of a game. Why bother creating strategy ahead of time when you can toss the ball once, miss, stare at the opposing team for half a minute, then call a time-out to think about your next move some more?

Take soccer, for instance. Screwed up your play? Tough. No time to run to the sideline and cry to the coach. You've got to start another play immediately, because that clock is only going to stop if a) land mines explode under the field or b) every player on both teams has his/her head simultaneously ripped off. The ref is not going to credit you for injury time unless you can demonstrate grievous, permanent disability to at least ¾ of your team. Bleeding? Cry us a river. Arm missing? Well, that'll keep you from accidentally using it on your way off the field.

Leg missing? You can bloody well hop off the field under your own power.

Somewhere between timeouts, time-between-downs, challenges to referee calls, and much standing around, a game was supposedly played on Sunday. Truthfully, we didn't notice.

We were just there for the commercials anyway. Well, perhaps not just the commercials. We had beer, and chili, and we found ourselves totally in love with the soft phosphorescent glow of the TV as it showed us very expensive commercials between attempts to play a game. In fact, we liked the commercials so much that we tracked down more commercials like the ones we saw and gathered around Jeff's laptop to watch them. We consumed more beer, cheese dip, and chili than is legally allowed in Alabama, and ignored the television until more commercials came on.

Then it was halftime.

There was Shania Twain, shimmering like some kind of bizarre fetish goddess in a rhinestone bustier. After determining that she was lip-synching, we found ourselves instead strangely hypnotized by her breasts, which, compressed into UniBreast by her bustier, jiggled disturbingly with every step.

Twin impulses were painful. How were we supposed to reconcile the Super Bowl requirement that one must eat copiously and continuously until the end of the telecast with the fact that we were unable to tear our eyes away from the freely jiggling breasts?

There was only one solution: eat without looking at our food.

We liked No Doubt's performance better. Every Super Bowl should have prancing cheerleaders at halftime. Even better if they looked like they were more likely to tear the quarterback to shreds than actually date him, like these did.

Eventually, the game resumed. Large refrigerator-sized men smacked each other around on a field. Balls were thrown, tossed, carried, dropped, recovered, and guarded like chalices. Fans yelled many obnoxious things and held up stupid signs. Some winning coach or another got dunked with water. Just as we would get bored, they would throw in commercials to keep us interested.

Some team won. It made no real difference to us.

It would have taken much to spark our interest in the actual game. Fiscal compensation might have worked, but we tended to agree with Andy's pet theory: land mines.

Yes, randomly-distributed land mines throughout the field and sidelines. Just when you think that player is going to successfully return that interception for a touchdown, he's taken apart by the landmine lying in wait under the five-yard-line...

The threat of instant death makes sport so much more entertaining for a bored audience. Who would want to bet on boring things like the score of a game when they could bet on how many heads would [literally] roll before the end of the first quarter? Think of the fun involved in taking your kids to...

I really should stop there.

Let us just say it this way: there was a game. We went to Stephen and Misty's. We didn't care about the game, and were far more interested in just the commercials. We ate dinner, sat around, talked, dinked around with our laptops, and generally had a good time until we all got tired and went home.

But if I'd written about it that way, why in the world would you want to read it?