Daily Press

Since we have been having this myriad ("myriad": more than "a passel" but less than "a humongous mess") of events leading up to Sunday's Super Bowl football game - TV specials, parades, highlight films, parties, riots, George Bush's inauguration - we ought to explain a little about it for you folks who haven't been paying attention.

First, the Super Bowl is a football game like no other. For the past several months, pro football teams have been playing each other for the standard reason: to give each other knee injuries. But on Super Bowl Sunday, the stakes are higher. Two teams will battle for the right to endorse products on television all spring and hire ghost writers to produce stirring "as told to" tales of their season.

This can be carried too far, though. I give you the example of the New York Giants, who won the Super Bowl two years ago, and immediately fell into an orgy of endorsing and book-ghost-writer-as-told-to. Therefore, according to the sports writers, the team was no longer "hungry." (Football players are supposed to be kept hungry all season. This is why they make them wear those mouthpieces, so they won't start chewing on each other.) Consequently, the Giants finished last year as losers.

In contrast, we have the Washington Redskins, last year's winners, who didn't run around endorsing and bookwriting and who kept their minds on the game and stayed hungry, and who consequently finished this year with a losing record. There is a lesson here for all of us.

This year's contestants are the Cincinnati Bengals, who won by the clever tactic of wearing these really stupid-looking helmets that their opponents couldn't stop laughing at long enough to get off a play, and the Montana 49ers, led by their great quarterback Joe San Francisco.

Not thrilled at the prospect of this great contest? Don't worry. The Super Bowl has also become a great occasion for partying. The (mostly male) football fans expect this means they will have some actual food prepared for them to eat during the game by the (mostly female) non-fans, instead of the 5-pound bag of corn chips they usually scarf down. What the women are actually doing out in the kitchen, though, is pulling out of the refrigerator all the foil-wrapped party food left over from Christmas, cutting off the brown edges and scraping the green stuff off the top and serving it to the guys, who don't notice. Meanwhile, the women sit out in the kitchen, eating the fresh quiche they brought and having a good laugh.

Obviously this is a party formula that satisfies everybody, but there is one potential flaw: the game itself. The last several Super Bowls have been won by scores of something like 97-3, with any suspense whatsoever about the outcome gone by midway through the second quarter. There is no longer even any question of whether the winner will cover the point spread, which might keep the gamblers watching.

The Super Bowl organizers are trying to combat this disinterest, however, with a flashy halftime show that they say is going to be broadcast in 3-D, which you can see if you wear those funny glasses.

This sounds impressive, until you recall that the game is being played in Miami, the nation's drug capital, so some of the fans in the stands are likely seeing the show in 5-D.

Also, you still have to get through the second half, which is when some of the party will start whining that they're going to miss "Murder, She Wrote." Keep them quiet by reminding them that they won't have to put up with any more football until next fall. Then have some more of that delicious bean dip, the stuff with the roots growing out of it.

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