I went to watch a football game and a media event broke out.

The annual hype fest that is Super Bowl media day has finally come and gone.  Now, there's only five days until the Cardinals and Steelers tee it up in Tampa.  Yes, there is a football game scheduled for Sunday, although you really wouldn't know it.

As with most Super Bowls, the game is an after thought.  People who aren't even football fans will be paying attention Sunday as the Super Bowl becomes an American festival of excess, a mid-winter celebration in bars and homes across America.  We'll stuff our faces with wings, nachos, chili and gallons of beer.  Maybe we'll check once in a while to see what the score is.

Most people can remember the party but not the game itself, unless they have a dog in the hunt.

But does anyone besides fans of the Cardinals and Steelers care about the game any more?

The pre-game starts at 11 central time, six plus hours before the kickoff.

The sports networks, news networks and edgy cable shows are already providing live updates.

Over the course of the next few days you'll read countless human interest stories like

• how a player(s) overcame adversity, and grew up in a (insert single parent family or raised by grandmother/aunt/sister) in one of the worst neighborhoods in (insert name of large American city or rural southern community) to finally make it to the big game. 
  
• Or the story of the fifteen year veteran who is playing in his first big game and how his teammates desperately want to win it for him.
  
• Or the coach who has revolutionized (insert discipline) and is getting a chance to display it in front of a curious nation.
• Or the fan from (insert foreign country) who got tickets to the game because he had always watched the (insert team name ) on TV in his country and just had to come to the big game.

BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE!

This year you will also get bonus coverage:

• The Bidwell family, who may be the worst ownership group in sports, will get treated like Saints instead of the blind, cognitively delayed squirrels that tripped over an acorn in spite of themselves.
• Kurt Warner and God. Ugh.
  
• The rise of the two coaches and how Mike Tomlin has the job Ken Whisenhunt really wanted, but how Ken is glad to be in Arizona and has no hard feelings and nothing to prove to anyone.  Uh huh.
  
• 1944 to the point of mind numbing annoyance.
  
• The Steelers going for their sixth Super Bowl win while the Cardinals haven't won since 1947.
• John Madden.  Enough said.
  

And on and on and on and on and on.

And then there is the pre-hype on the commercials. And every celebrity chef from Wolfgang to Bobby to Mario to Rachael to Giada to Paula will be whipping up some calorie busting, crowd pleasing treat on any one of a number talk shows (if I see one more guacamole football field, I think I will hurl.)

The NBC pre-game show has more people than the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.  What exactly do you do during a six hour pre-game anyway?  You summon the ghosts of Gene Kelly and Donald O'Connor and you tap your hearts out.

Can't we just shut up and play football? Please?