It doesn't matter if you don't care about football, goofy, expensive TV ads or Beyonce, Sunday's Super Bowl is mandatory viewing for anyone interested in America watching.
One way sociologists and anthropologists gain an understanding about a culture is through its celebrations and the Super Bowl is one massive celebration of America and the American way of life. If that sickens you, the weather's supposed to be great Sunday afternoon and there will be some fantastic cross-country skiing competition at Otway and snowboard cross at Tabor to get you in the spirit for the 2015 Canada Winter Games, just two short years away.
But if you can't help immersing yourself in Americana, the Super Bowl is must-see TV.
For starters, football is America's game, its brutal violence, intense, concentrated blasts of action and unpredictability, having long replaced the leisurely, cerebral game of baseball.
Football fits in more with America's military culture, with its armies of huge men, literally human tanks, lined up against each other in battle, where inches and one slight error can make the difference between victory or defeat, where unexpected heroes rise to the challenge and where warriors write their names into history.
If you think that language is purple, overheated and overly dramatic, then you've never watched an NFL Films production.
Founded more than 50 years, NFL Films is the league's propaganda arm, producing gorgeous works of art that turn games and plays into moments of achievement or tragedy. Between the Wagnerian music, the deep, serious voiceovers, the slow-motion pounding of massive men colliding and the sound of those collisions mixed in perfectly, NFL Films transforms mere football games into legendary battles for glory and honour.
NFL Films not only created the way modern football is viewed, it shaped the way nearly all professional sports are presented to viewers at home. It pioneered the use of multiple cameras blanketing the field of play from various perspectives, numerous, well-positioned microphones capturing the sound of warfare - grunts, collisions, thuds, groans, as well as slow-motion editing to create tension as the spiral of the football out of the quarterback's hands is followed in excruciating detail to its target.
Baseball has tried to copy the NFL Films style but the game is simply too gentlemanly, like golf and tennis, to benefit from the physicality of fighting for victory. When they do it, it comes across as silly and contrived.
Hockey and basketball, however, have fully embraced the NFL Films style. CBC's two-minute opening segment to Game 5 of the 2011 Stanley Cup final between the Vancouver Canucks and the Boston Bruins, set to an edited version of Matthew Good's dramatic song Weapon, is an homage to NFL Films (type "Game 5 intro Canucks" on YouTube to see it again). It's a stylized war movie and anyone who doesn't believe the Canucks and Bruins series was a battle for the ages after watching it is missing a pulse.
Even action movies follow the playbook, framing key fight scenes using the same visual and audio techniques that NFL Films pioneered.
Live network broadcasts have embraced the NFL Films ethic, of course, and that will be on full display Sunday.
Never mind the game - how about the drama?
Ray Lewis playing in his final game with the championship on the line.
Michael Oher, the subject of the hit movie The Blind Side, is suiting up for his first Super Bowl.
The two head coaches - the generals plotting the tactics of their soldiers - are brothers but only one will lift the Vince Lombardi trophy.
There's nothing like the Super Bowl for sheer spectacle.
There are countless reasons why the game is called super and America will have every one of them on full display Sunday afternoon.
