It is half-past five on the afternoon of Super Bowl Sunday.  The house smells like chili and I’ve seen more of Bob Costas today than I have of my wife.  Every five minutes NBC airs another player’s amazing story of how he got to Indianapolis, and I’m starting to wonder whether wearing both a Giants t-shirt and a Giants hat will cause a double-jockwear explosion in my living room like crossing the streams of the Ghostbusters’ proton packs.

I have been so immersed in the coverage for the last two weeks that I’ve forgotten what life was like before the conference championships.  It seems like I was just born into a world where the Giants and the Patriots are the only two teams in existence, and are set to play each other in a championship game on a day that is very close but somehow never arrives.

How did I get out of bed each morning without an update on Rob Gronkowski’s ankle to look forward to?  How did I get through the day without the trash-talking tweets from the Giants’ defense?  How did I get to sleep each night without yet another round-table discussion of whether Tom Brady is the greatest quarterback of all time despite his never appearing in a Pepsi commercial?

In about an hour the big game is going to start, and a few hours later the big game is going to end, barring a major disruption in the space-time continuum that extends the game infinitely, which I think Roger Goodell tried to push at the last round of labor talks.  And tomorrow morning I will have to face a world without a Super Bowl, a world without 24-hour injury updates, a world without an econometric comparison of Buffalo wings with Doritos.

But if there’s one thing that watching professional sports teaches you, is that somehow you have to to find the strength to go on.  And that Ford trucks are built Ford tough.