The Super Bowl is like dating.
Or more specifically, the media-hype surrounding the Super Bowl every year can be likened to the interplay between two people who are just beginning to date.
From start to finish, you’re rooting for a very specific result. At the same time, you don’t want to get your hopes up to the point where it hurts so much worse when things fall apart, or when your team ends up choking in The Big One.
Nonchalance is the way to go. The less hype (read: hope) you place on a game – be it the dating game or the biggest football game of the year – the more likely it is that it’ll turn out well.
But that’s precisely the problem for me. I don’t do nonchalant.
My friends would tell you that I’m feisty, spirited and energetic. Nonchalant means chill, calm and sedated. Nonchalant doesn’t quite fit me.
It doesn’t help my case that the Colts are in this year’s Super Bowl.
See for a while now, I’ve been somewhat disturbed by the fact that my sports fanaticism has diminished significantly as the result of getting to write sports for a living (Note: I use the term “for a living” loosely. Contrary to what some might believe, where I work, we actually don’t get paid enough to live off.)
I never thought this would ever happen. I used to be a sports junkie. On any given day I used to be able to tell you exactly which overpriced wide receiver had been traded to which underperforming team, what ridiculous looking outfit Serena Williams wore during her last match, or what kind of sick dunk Dwayne Wade pulled off over the head of some poor unsuspecting forward.
But when you’re writing, talking, living and breathing sports while trying to juggle school, another job, and some semblance of a social life on the side, the last thing you want to do when you get home at night is plop down on the couch and watch more sports.
Still, even as my Yankees sympathies waned and my interest in the NBA subsided, the one sports obsession I’ve maintained is my loyalty to the Indianapolis Colts.
I’ve been a Peyton Manning fan since the first day he started under center for the Colts in 1998. I watched as he struggled through the growing pains that rookie quarterbacks all go through in their first couple of seasons, I cringed every time the formerly terrible Colts defense lost the team a close game that had been a perfectly engineered Manning special until they stepped onto the field.
Over the last couple of years, the postseason was always the worst period of the year for Manning fans. Watching him take on Tom Brady and the Patriots in the 2003 and 2004 conference championships was just downright painful.
But all that’s behind us now. Ever since the Colts beat the Patriots two weeks ago, dozens of columnists before me have already analyzed, rehashed and replayed the game in which the football gods finally granted Manning his moment and handed him a ticket to Super Bowl XLI in Miami.
All Manning has to do now to avoid going down in history as this generation’s Dan Marino is to pulverize the Bears on Sunday.
I’m busy trying not to get my hopes up. Because this time the heartbreak might be too much to take. Just like my last dating encounter. Or like last year’s Super Bowl, when the Seahawks (my third-favorite NFL team after Indy and Green Bay) got slaughtered at the hands of the Steelers.
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