RICHARD SHERMAN Walking down the airstairs to destiny… or Newark...

For the last two weeks, I’ve thought about little aside from whether Seattle’s defense is capable of stopping Peyton Manning’s prolific passing attack on Sunday. As a lifelong Seahawks fan, I’m seeing my team in the Super Bowl for only the second time, and the first time went poorly. In preparation for Super Bowl XLVIII, I’ve been immersing myself in the numbers to try to come up with a meaningful prediction. Having done that, I can tell you with great certainty: The numbers aren’t helping.

This isn’t to say the numbers are wrong. They aren’t. They just aren’t saying anything helpful for a fan in a state of psychological disrepair. Grantland’s Bill Barnwell has written extensively about the scale of matchup Peyton-Manning-versus-the-Seahawks-defense portends to be. However, the level of quality on both sides of the ball also speaks to the game’s unpredictability, even if Barnwell picked the Seahawks to win (woo! We’re going to win, Bill Barnwell said so!). Nate Silver’s pre-Super-Bowl Colbert Report appearance was essentially him shrugging and trying to explain the limits of pre-game analysis. Sure, Silver said the Seahawks are infinitesimally slight favorites (wooooo! We’re going to win, Nate Silver said so!), but in the same breath he explained his lack of confidence in the pick. Anything could happen in every Super Bowl, but really, anything could happen in this one.

I know this. In my better moments, I am rational, and I know there is no metric that exists that will divine the outcome of this Sunday’s Super Bowl. No amount of research can give me any more meaningful insight than I already have. Any number of permutations are possible, even massive blowouts. The Seahawks could find early success through the air with the reintroduction of Percy Harvin, grab a quick 14-point lead, and squeeze the life out of Peyton Manning’s Broncos with their underrated pass rush. Just as easily, the Broncos’ no-huddle offense could disrupt Seattle’s defensive substitution patterns, and Manning could grab a big early lead against a prematurely tired and mismatched front four.

Worse, there are all of the variations of this game that are incredibly close. A game where equally matched foes trade blows, leaving the game to be decided in its dying moments. A game where every player has the ability to affect it with a single moment of genius or madness. A game that will provide Shakespearean levels of catharsis regardless of the outcome.

And that’s why we watch sports, right? To get those moments of catharsis. To experience extreme emotions without genuine suffering. The experience is real, but it is also contained, locked into both the field of play and the part of our brains that knows it’s just a game, quarantining the consequences away from our work, our friends, our families. So why am I pursuing knowledge that isn’t coming? Why have I spent the past two weeks digging into data sets that all say the same thing: anything is possible? Why am I looking for any other answer? Pain avoidance? Fear of my own mortality?

Paul Kalanthi, the chief resident of neurological surgery at Stanford, wrote a fascinating New York Times Op-Ep this past weekend on the use (and the uselessness) of statistics in the face of a lung-cancer diagnosis. He went from being the person delivering prognoses to the person receiving a prognosis, which changed his whole attitude about statistics. Two sentences in particular have stuck with me: “Getting too deep into statistics is like trying to quench a thirst with salty water. The angst of facing mortality has no remedy in probability.”

The language of immortality saturates how we discuss championship games. You will probably hear that a win in Super Bowl XLVIII will live forever for the players involved. But for fans, it is our mortality that hangs on the outcome of this game. As the cliche goes, I’m sixty minutes away from being given the peace of seeing my team win before I die. Which is both an absurd trivialization of the meaning of death and also the point of sports. I get to feel the life-and-death feelings without actually being in peril. So, why watch sports if not for the sanctuary for emotional volatility that they provide? And why try to blunt those emotions by massaging a data set into giving a false positive? Even if I could know what’s going to happen, it would only insulate me from all the best (even if they feel like the worst) parts of being a Seahawks fan. And also, I couldn’t know even if I wanted to. And yet knowing all of that, I still desperately want to know, to be able to predict meaningfully, without bias.

But I don’t know. And I lack the capacity to cast aside my biases. That said, here’s a prediction: Seahawks 30, Broncos 20.

This has been a message from your (potentially soon to be departed) sports editor. Spike Friedman also writes for Grantland and makes theater with Satori Group. His new play Returning to Albert Joseph will be produced this May.