David Trinko: Big game brings out big passion in all of us

Starting next week, I am due for seven months of sedation.

It's back to quiet Sunday afternoons hanging out with the family. If we're out and about, I'll spend less time checking my cell phone for updates. I'll eliminate most of my time yelling at the TV and using phrases such as “come on” and “wow” or using words my dad learned in the Navy.

As The Kinks sang about so many men, “I'm not the world's most passionate guy.” There's something about NFL football that brings it out of us.

I'm not much of a yeller, at work or at home. I'm generally an even-keeled, calm person. Just watch what happens when my team misses an easy sack opportunity or overthrows a wide-open receiver. I'll use my outdoors voice inside, as we tell our children not to do.

Today, of course, is Super Bowl Sunday. It's probably my favorite day of the year, even though I know it means there's no football on TV next weekend. I'll deal with the withdrawal then. For now, I'll focus on the positive.

I love the hours upon hours of coverage leading up to the game, telling you every little obstacle each backup tight end overcame to get to the game. I gobble up every story in the newspaper or on LimaSports.com's Super Bowl website leading up to the game. I'm loaded up on facts and figures that I'll acknowledge are totally useless come Monday morning.

It's become a shared passion for Americans over the last 45 years. Even people who don't normally watch football tune in each year, just to be part of our country's celebration. It's like New Year's Eve without staying up so late.

I can't help but wonder what makes us as a society so crazed about the Super Bowl.

I don't have a deep attachment to either team. I don't love the Giants or Patriots this year. I don't hate either of them either. Neither of them played my beloved Bears this year, so there's no warm or cold feeling left over from that.

I have a little bit on the line in this game. Each year, my wife and I bet on the outcome of the game. The loser plans our Valentine's date, so a New York victory takes a giant amount of romantic planning off my plate. I'm on a three-year losing streak, and I'm running out of creative ideas. Even this attachment to someone I truly love doesn't explain this infatuation with one football game.

Perhaps it's the memories and traditions. Most of the Super Bowls happened in my lifetime. I remember where I was as I watched each game, whether it was watching the final minutes of Chicago's blowout win against the Patriots alone in my parent's living room after the crowd dispersed or sitting on the edge of my own couch when the Giants knocked off the Patriots a few years ago.

Really, I think we feel passionate about football because we can. Societal norms value keeping your emotions under control. Football is an exception to that, and Super Bowl Sunday celebrates the wild-eyed joy and frustration in all of us.

There are other sports, of course, and I enjoy many of them. They're not the same as the spectacle of football, though, with the bone-crunching hits, the traditions or the pageantry. You watch a basketball game; you plan your life around a football game.

I'm happy I've instilled these same attitudes in my children. They might be too young to sit through an entire game, but I can count on them for a quarter of screaming at the TV. They know what a good play looks like, and they know what a bad play looks like. They know just enough to scream for both of them.

The next seven months will be about spending Sundays together, peacefully playing, working on home improvement projects or visiting family and friends. Today is about football and celebrating that passion we can only show during a game.