Picture this: a NYC railroad apartment, fit for maybe twenty people max, jammed on either side with fifty or so reverent displaced Bostonians -- their team, the Pats, with a dinky replacement quarterback, and enough feel-good stories and snow-filled poetic victories to fill the Sports Almanac is about to win the Super Bowl for the city that's always been the Little Town That Couldn't. If you're from Boston, you're required to get some year-long goosebumbs, drink yourself silly and write articles with grandiose and entirely sincere titles like Now I Can Die in Peace. Read the article and translate the hysteria to a small New York apartment.

And then, cut to this year: I walk in halfway through the first quarter, hung over from a previous night's drinking engagement, and have to remind myself who the hell is playing this year. Guess you can call me a fair-weather fan, but when your team won the Super Bowl last year, and then couldn't even do me courtesy of making the playoffs this year, there just ain't much to be excited about. Not even if the Asian Invasion himself, Yao Ming, stepped out in his Rockets jersey and started hiking the football would I have lifted an eyebrow. Actually, that would have been damn cool. Scratch that. If ABC hosted a two hour special of Yao Ming reading New York City tax code violations I would watch.

But you find other ways to be entertained. You imbibe if you can and you watch commercials. Our greatest cultural export at its finest moment. I'm no crazy killin' terrorist or nuthin', but if I were, I think I'd watch the Super Bowl with a soviet made rifle cocked and loaded at the tv and when the American flag came down and the Dixie Chicks started singing I would fire away. One for each Dixie. Which would mean three innocent Japanese-made tvs down the drain.

So I guess this would be my suggestion for next year: let's make the Super Bowl a little more terrorist friendly. Ok? One commercial for us, and one for the bad guys. Would that not be entertaining? Remember the Bud Bowl? Let's make it the Bush Bowl - stick GW and Osama in big beer outfits and let them go at it. Winner gets all the innocent lives they want. Now that's entertainment, or as I like to call it A Metaphor for the Larger War Involving Real People and Real Deaths. So either that, or let the Pats be in it again, because otherwise I'm staying home and watching Yao Ming read the phonebook. Oh Yao, how I love Ye.