Today’s essay goes out to all my sports-hating, square-hating, mainstream-society-hating good pals on Seattle’s Capitol Hill.

Despite everything your subculture’s taught you to believe, it’s OK to like football.

Yes, American football.

Yes, that game you’ve hated ever since your dysfunctional public high school ordered you to love it. That game so beloved by the jocks who bullied you and the cheerleaders who ignored you. That game you’ve ever since associated with everything you despise about everybody in America who’s different from you.

As I wrote in this space a month ago, it’s time to stop hating everyone who’s different from you. Way past time, in fact.

Time to learn to see the world through other eyes. To learn new experiences and new passions.

And this week’s Super Bowl can provide a great opportunity to do all that and more.

First: Take a new, different look at the game itself. Appreciate its complexity and its intricacy.

Baseball has been described as a game of control vs. chaos, with the defense in control. American football is a game of order vs. entropy, with the offense on the side of order. The offense, essentially, tries to make things happen; the defense tries to make things not happen.

The highlight reels like to celebrate the achievements of individual stars catching that pass, kicking that long field goal, making that out-of-nowhere tackle. But football’s really a game of precision group choreography. On any given play, each of the 22 players on the field has a role in the execution or the interruption of a preplanned play. If the offense works in sync and everything else works out, points are scored or yards are gained. If the defense is smarter or luckier, points aren’t scored and yards aren’t gained. In no other major US sport is individual prowess less important and cooperative work more important.

And that includes cooperative work among different races, socio-economic classes, and religions. In schools and communities that are truly integrated (not merely desegregated), the football team’s often been one of the first places where different students have learned to work and live together.

(I won’t even hardly mention the role of athletic scholarships in helping a lucky few to rise above their given station in life. Without his, Starbucks mogul Howard Schultz might have never gone to college, and East Coast media know-nothings would have one fewer stereotype to make about Seahawks fans.)

One taboo remains, at least on the field—openly gay players. Today’s pro sports world is more accepting of lesbians than of gay men. I’m sure it’s at least partly due to the old stereotype that gay men are somehow less than fully masculine. That, of course, is just plain silly–in all my years on and near Capitol Hill, many (if most most) of the most macho men I’ve known have been gay.

And I’m sure that, given time and a few brave people, that taboo will also fall.

For now, the game has its share of gay and lesbian fans, who’ll enjoy Sunday’s great spectacle as well as anyone.
As previously mentioned here, I happened to see the Seahaws/Redskins playoff game in a small neighborhood joint with one other man and 13 women, some of whom were making coy little “passes” toward one another during the commercials.

Some of these women were quite vocal about showing off their knowledge of the game—guessing what the next play would/should be, reacting loudly to great game play or lousy officiating. Other women in the group simply enthused over the sights and sounds of the game. They may have preferred the in-person company of other women, but they still got a kick out of seeing big men running and jumping and throwing and crashing into one another and being interviewed afterwards in their undies.