“Blood on the ice ran down through the years, the king of the goons with a box for a throne. A thousand stitches and broken bones, he never lost a fight on his icy patrol.” From Hit Somebody, written by Warren Zevon and Mitch Albom.

I’ve long possessed a go-to line when I want to leave a party or a large dinner filled with people too normal to engage in my pop culture passions. I tell them I find football to be boring.

Not stupid, not dangerous, not big-tummied people who paint themselves up because getting a ginormous tattoo probably is lethal. Nope. Simply boring. People are at first incredulous, but they quickly succumb to the creepiness inherent in my sincerity. “Boring?” They respond… or “Boring? Really?” if they are among the more erudite.

I inform them I’m a hockey fan, and the area around me thins out. Those who are hockey fans as well might shoot me a kind look of support. Hockey is a very fast, very high impact game played by professional monsters too young to have a fear of death yet too well-employed to have all of their teeth. Even in what looks like a likely blowout, the fate of a game can switch in the last three minutes.

In comparison, football is, to me, little more than a large hunch of well-built apemen slamming into each other for one minute and then wandering around for five minutes discussing what happened. My first paying gig at wordsmithing was as a prep sports writer, and even then I had a hard time covering football.

The fact that the shape of the football itself is wacky does not help. And it’s called football — at least here in America and Canada — yet very little is done with the feet. Yeah, they run around for a few seconds every five minutes but on the rare occasion that somebody applies foot to ball it looks to me like a Robin Williams routine.

No judgment here. I believe in giving the people what they want and, because football is very political, I sync that with freedom of speech. There’s no subgroup in the First Amendment for “freedom of sports,” so to each their own… at least among consenting adults.

If you’re a fan of old movie comedies, you will note that football has been a major part of the American culture since Yale’s Walter Camp screwed up rugby in 1880. For the record, this is why hockey fans think rugby fans are pussies. Buster Keaton, The Marx Brothers, The Three Stooges, Harold Lloyd, Eddie Cantor, and many others made extremely successful films built around college football. The “professional” stuff that really didn’t seep into our culture until network television started unearthing color.

As a kid, college football confused me. My father worked on Saturdays, and he’d bring home the five-pound bulldog edition of the Chicago Sunday Tribune. The front page (back then we called ‘em “front pages” and not “covers”) was drowning in college football scores, and not just those of the local schools. I couldn’t understand why. I understood one can be loyal to the home town team — as a native born Chicago northsider I am a Cubs fan by birthright — but college is a place where you hung around for a few years (if you’re patient) trying to get laid (if you’re patient); why are you forever loyal to a mascot you only saw a couple dozen times?

Like I said, “freedom of sports.” Live and let live. Just stop taking a whiz on the parking lot. Hockey fans use the indoor plumbing. Being hockey fans, we can hold our piss as we wait.

So, if you want to meet up with me any time soon — I can’t imagine why, but there’s no accounting for taste — try checking out the supermarkets in my neighborhood on Super Bowl Sunday.

I can always catch the Bad Bunny gig online.

(Right now, as your columnist is writing these words of wisdom, the Chicago Bears and the Los Angeles Rams are tied 17 to 17 in overtime… and your columnist was writing these words.)