Super? Hardly

We need to make one thing clear right away: The Super Bowl -- which is certainly a uniquely American spectacle -- is not about football. In fact, I'd submit to you that the game is irrelevent in the big picture.

Oh, it's certainly a part of the day ... a very large part, too, since without it there would be no vehicle for the wretched excess that goes with it. But in a curious sort of way, once we acknowledge how important the game is, it quickly sinks below the surface of what has become one of the most celebrated days of greed and excessive consumerism ever foisted upon the American public.

You get a sense of this when you watch the Super Bowl on television. Maybe one in five people watching actually care about the game. The other four watch for the commercials, or the halftime show, or the pregame show. I liken it to the Kentucky Derby because even people who know next to nothing about horse racing watch it because, heck, it's the KENTUCKY DERBY!

Only the Super Bowl is worse. Name me one other television show where the topic of conversation the next day centers around the commercials. Most of the time, commercials are an annoying necessity. We tune them out, or we take care of our physical needs, or we go out to the kitchen and make a sandwich. But in the Super Bowl, we stick around and rate the commercials as if they're up for academy awards.

And notice I said "television show." That was not a mistake. The Super Bowl is a television show, and that's why -- after having seen one without the benefit of commercials to compensate for the ennui of inaction -- I can no longer take it seriously as an American SPORTING event.

American ENTERTAINMENT event ... yes. You have to respect the Super Bowl for the sheer power of the money it hauls in. But it's time we all got the stars out of our eyes when it comes to the importance of the GAME, as opposed to the importance of the EVENT.

Here is the Super Bowl in 2008: One giant cacophony of NOISE. There is no way to filter this noise out, either. There is no time to just sit in the stands and be allowed to take it all in on your own terms. You are assaulted with noise from the time you get there until the time you leave.

The jumbotron scoreboard goes non-stop. NFL season highlights, advertisements, interviews with players, non-stop NFL self-promotion. And -- worst of all -- non-stop NFL self-congratulations for what wonderful people they all are.

These messages are repeated over and over again at ear-piercing decibels, with loud music, loud percussion, and loud narration. As soon as the action stops, the noise begins. It was so bad this year that Tom Petty's four-song halftime set was actually quiet by comparison.

This brings us to the commercials. I will concede that when it comes to creativity, Super Bowl commercials bring out the A-game in every advertiser. Some of them are pretty clever, some of them are funny, and, conversely, some of them overreach beyond comprehension. But you have to admire the effort.

But if you're at the stadium, you don't see the commercials. You hear excessively loud noise that launches a wholescale assault on your eardrums ... and you hear it for the entire time the rest of the country is entertained by those commercials.

What probably made it worse this year was that the first quarter flew by -- thanks to a nine-plus minute drive by the New York Giants that opened the game. That must have had the FOX honchos screaming. I know they'd have given anything to stick a four-minute block of commercials in there while Eli Manning was leading the Jints upfield, but even the NFL isn't that shameless.

That meant that FOX was left to squeeze them in basically over three quarters instead of four. That meant longer delays down there on the field. And it meant more noise everywhere else.

What does all this mean? It means the Super Bowl isn't a football game as much as it is a television show. Now before anyone accuses me of being naive, I understand that just about ALL sports these days are like this. Whenver the Boston College football team has a nationally televised game, there's a man in a red jacket who stands out there on the 20-yard line, with a set of headphones in his ears, and in a bright red jacket, and he's the guy who signals the referee that it's OK to start playing again.

However, the Super Bowl is essentially that times about a hundred. About the only thing I could ever compare it to was the time I went to see Bozo the Clown when I was a little kid ... and became horribly disillusioned at how absolutely FAKE it was ... the forced spontaneity ... all of it. Everything was choreographed right down to the last second, including the enthusiastic cheer the children gave Bozo. Even that had to be rehearsed.

That's how intricately choreographed the Super Bowl is. And if just went to Glendale to see a game -- as I did -- it is horribly frustrating to have to sit through all that noise, all that mindless spectacle, just for the honor of watching a football game.

I didn't have to pay a cent. I got a press credential so I didn't measure my experience in terms of dollars and cents. But had I spent up to five figures for a good seat, I'd be thinking that I got zero bang for my buck.

People ask me, often, how I can go from covering the AFC championship game, or the Super Bowl, or the World Series to going to Saugus High on a Saturday morning to watch the Sachems match wits with Winthrop. And the answer is easy. It may be a miniature version of what went on this past Sunday, but it's just as real to the kids who play high school ball on a Saturday afternoon in Saugus as it is to Tom Brady and Bill Belichick. And I am privileged to be able to treat it as if it's every bit as real.

People always want to know "what is it like" covering the Patriots and Red Sox. It's WORK. Your average Patriots game -- for me -- starts at 9 a.m. on a Sunday when I have to leave for Foxborough ahead of the traffic. It ends somewhere around 9 at night when I'm finally pulling into my driveway. When they're home, and when they're playing their normal 1 p.m. game, they cost me an entire Sunday. If they play at 4 p.m., or at night, it's worse. There's nothing like driving up to your house in Lynn at 3 a.m. after having covered a Sunday or a Monday night football game in Foxborough.

I'm not complaining. It's work a lot of people would kill to be able to do. It's certainly not boring. Even the dullest game is better than sitting around an office from 9 to 5 every day, going to endless meetings and listening to executives drone on and on about God knows what. Covering pro sports has given me some pretty big thrills. And even though I was certainly not rooting for the Giants Sunday, how can you not walk away from a game where the pivotal play involved a receiver catching the ball off his HELMET without being eternally grateful that you were THERE to see it?

I just wish there was more of that Sunday and less needless noise. Because at the end of the day, we may have witnessed one of the true upsets in the history of the National Football League. But it was all buried beneath the symphony of noise, consumerism, excess and greed that, all rolled up into one, makes up the Super Bowl.