John Teti, who writes the Onion's AV Club new-just-in-time-for-the-end Block & Tackle column, tells it like it is:

...I’m talking to you, the graduate student who tweets “Time to catch up on my Proust” two minutes before kickoff. May you be struck with the flu on the day of your dissertation defense. And to you, the parent who takes his kids sledding on Super Bowl Sunday and posts a picture to Instagram with the caption “What football game?” Oh, and of course you applied the “1977” photo filter. May your firstborn face-plant into the nearest snowbank, and may you capture the moment in tilt-shifted, high-dynamic-range, desaturated glory....

All of America watches the big game, he says—except for the 50-percent-ish of all people watching TV during the Super Bowl who are watching something else. But still, this is one of our few remaining collective moments as a country, which, Teti says, still counts for something... and if you're in the silent majority who don't care, he asks that you kindly shut up. Then he's got some thoughts on why the Big Game itself is weird, a prediction of who will win (SEAHAWKS!!!), special segments on "Unpronounceable Stars Of The Super Bowl," analysis of Super Bowl rings, and so much more I really don't have time to read it all right now (but! There's a football-game-winners-picking cat!).

Here in Seattle, if you're still saying you don't care, you're faking. Even those of us who really didn't care cannot remain unmoved by the human drama of Richard Sherman and Marshawn Lynch—the questions about race and aggression and what it means to talk and what it means to just want to be quiet. A hermit crab, amazingly, is involved, because Seattle is, truly, great in many ways. Downtown is lit up at night in blue and green; the number 12 is everywhere, a rune, a spell. Then we're talking to our friends across the country and we might even feel a tiny bit of empathy for the quarterback of that other team, who's apparently had a grazillion surgeries and has been playing for 97 years and kind of deserves to get a big old honkin' supershiny ring... then, on behalf of our dads and our insane sportsfan friends, we can only say GO BIRDS! But mostly we're looking forward to the drinks and the snacks, and to watching our friends cry—tears of joy, we hope. Then we'll all go party in the streets! Even if it's raining.