Fifty big dudes from New York played football better than fifty big dudes from Massachusetts. That's such exciting news, especially since I happen to be from the same region of the country that the winning team plays their home games in! It's like we're all brothers! If I have to hear one more knuckle-dragger thrill about how "we" won the Super Bowl, I swear I'm gonna punch someone. "We" did not win anything ━ the Giants won, you sat on your fat ass and stuffed a bag of Doritos down your maw. There's a difference.

Even worse are the New York tabloids, each one the first to declare the Giants' win a "miracle," and the football players themselves, who all insist on thanking God for winning the game. God, if He exists, had better have more important things to spend His time on than giving Eli Manning (or somebody, I don't really follow football) the strength to throw an eighty-yard touchdown pass (or whatever), or I'm converting to Satanism. God ━ I know this isn't the way things work, but God should smite these football players for their hubris, and the false humility they mask it with. It's not like anyone at the Super Bowl is rescuing puppies from burning buildings or anything.

There's the argument that these professional sports, the community winning vicariously, cements us together in the shared experience. I've read about the Palio di Siena and its effect, that of a needlessly violent symbolic confrontation, dropping the city's crime rate, and I wonder if anyone's done a study about the communal effect of football and its ball throwing, catching, and primitive homosexual overtones. Personally, I think that actually smashing things in a consequence-free environment would be a lot more cathartic than watching other people do it, especially when they get a couple million dollars, a 2008 Cadillac Bling-Mobile, and a trip to Disneyland as compensation for the bruises and broken bones.

I believe that's why they came up with Grand Theft Auto.