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Sunday in Atlanta, the Los Angeles Rams will face the New England Patriots to decide the National Football League title and be crowned world champions of American professional football. (It’s a small ‘world,’ after all.) Once the game is over, the winners will receive pre-made hats and T-shirts — and a hunk of glistening metal called the Lombardi Trophy. The pre-made celebratory hats and T-shirts depicting the non-winning team will find their way (and I’m not kidding) to families in impoverished countries around the world. For four consecutive years in the 1990s, the Buffalo Bills became the most popular team in countries that perhaps had no sense of who this “Lombardi” guy was. The Super Bowl is the longest television show of the year. The NFL Network (yes, it exists; it’s the one just before the Investigation Discovery Channel ... and, yes, that exists) has scheduled a pre-game show that will last 8.5 hours until the 3:30 p.m. Pacific kickoff. For the sake of comparison, you could watch the entire series runs of “Turn-On,” “Heil Honey, I’m Home,” “W*A*L*T*E*R,” and “Viva Laughlin” during those 510 minutes ... and still have time to try to forget you ever saw “Turn-On,” “Heil Honey, I’m Home,” “W*A*L*T*E*R,” and “Viva Laughlin.” (Yes, “Heil Honey, I’m Home” existed. You can find it on YouTube.) Why do we watch the Super Bowl? Well, and I know there’s a few of you out there waiting for this, that’s really two questions. The first is ... “Why?” ... a question that has plagued philosophers and educators from Socrates to Corey in a never-resolved quandary over the nature of the course of events. The other question — “Do we watch the Super Bowl?” — is much easier to answer. Yep. According to the NFL, an estimated 167,000,000 viewed all or some of the Super Bowl in 2016 ... roughly 30 million more than voted in the presidential election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. That was Super Bowl 50, when the Denver Broncos beat the Carolina Panthers. You’ll note the use of the Arabic numerals in what, by tradition, is usually denoted by Roman numbers. This year, for instance, is Super Bowl LIII. The NFL wanted its 50th Super Bowl to stand out from the rest and made a one-year change. Ignoring the fact, of course, that it was predicated on a lie. The first two contests that crowned world champions of American professional football were called the “NFL-AFL Championship Game” in the years before the two leagues merged. Which means that the trophy named in honor of the late legendary coach Vince Lombardi — whose Green Bay Packers won those first two games — technically is handed out to the winners of a game in which he never participated. Although it had been kicked around informally, the “Super Bowl” name wasn’t attached officially until 50 years ago ... for Super Bowl III. And, if you REALLY want to get technical about it (and I just can’t help myself at this point), “Super Bowl III,” which has a claim to being Super Bowl I, is a misnomer as well — since Roman numbers weren’t added until what is known as Super Bowl V. People simply have erased the historical record of what existed before — like when Richie Cunningham’s older brother Chuck went upstairs. (Go ahead, impress and/or irritate your friends during the 510 minutes of pre-game palaver by dropping that bit of trivial nonsense on them.) Speaking of things whose names were changed over the years, the Los Angeles Rams began life as the Cleveland Rams (so named in part, the story goes, because “Rams” is a short word that would fit easily into newspaper headlines — take that, “Buccaneers”), before moving to Los Angeles in 1946, St. Louis for the 1995 season and back to Los Angeles 20 years later. Meanwhile, the Patriots — typographic brevity nerds will note the r, i and two t’s — began as the Boston Patriots before moving to the suburbs and (after a brief flirtation with changing their name to the Bay State Patriots) changed their name to represent the six-state region of New England ... although half of Connecticut is filled with fans of the two teams from New York, who play their games in New Jersey. None of this would be helpful to a Super Bowl newbie about to watch his first game. Part of the communal experience of gathering around overpriced and oversized screens, though, is the freshness of the event. The game will be played once. Those with emotional connections to the teams, or to the action of the play, will be swept up and brought into that roller coaster. Even veterans of watching all LIII (or should it be XLIX?) Super Bowls will see something in those 12 minutes that they’ve never seen before. And, of course, there’s the millions of dollars spent on commercials, the Puppy Bowl, the Kitten Bowl, something called Maroon 5 at halftime, the post-game shows which will show you once again what you just saw, the . wait, wait, back up there trivial technicality guy ... this thing is only 12 minutes long? Yep. The average NFL game consists of right around 12 minutes of actual game play, spread out over a broadcast that lasts about four hours. (Think in terms of the theory of relativity, and you’ll be fine.) But don’t worry, there are more than 100 national, regional and local commercial spots to draw your attention away from the idea that so many people are spending so much time and so much money to watch so few moments of action. At least you won’t be alone. Maroon 5 newbie Robert Galvin, copy desk chief of the Mail Tribune, can be reached at [email protected].