I am currently suffering from alarmingly low levels of football. American football. I’m not sure if I am going to make it. First, my husband tore his ACL and had to be sidelined from his Spring and Summer flag football leagues. Then, Comcast got into some kind of fight with the NFL Network and threatened to take away my off-season fix. (Fortunately, they are currently in “productive negotiation.")

Why, you may ask, do I not substitute the gridiron for the court, the ice or the diamond? Because neither basketball, nor hockey, nor baseball hold me in quite the same thrall as does the tossing about of a pigskin. Football is a philosophy, a religion, even. There is no situation in life that cannot be accurately explained and satisfactorily resolved by football metaphors.

Take relationships. You can use every play in the book, but if you’re not getting in the end zone, you’re just going to have to punt.

Your job? You can be the best quarterback in the world, but if you have lousy receivers, you’re never going to win. (Unless, of course, you’ve got a sweet running game, in which case, compensation should be adjusted to reward your dependable backs instead of the flashy rookie you blew your first draft pick and salary budget on.)

Your whole career can be distilled into a single game or an entire season. First you’re ahead. Then you’re behind. Sometimes you have good blocking. Sometimes the other team gives you a couple of helmets on your bum knee. Sometimes the competition falls flat on their faces and you get to cruise right across their goal line. Referees make bad calls and you have to work overtime. Everybody’s your biggest fan when you’re winning, but you’re a pariah when you’re not making plays.

Of course, these analogies can be applied to a lot of sports. But what other game requires you to literally dig your toes into the grassy earth, thrust your entire mass forward, and force the refrigerator-sized man across from you to stumble heavily backward—all without using your hands? In what other sport is a violent, desperate two inches of progress across a bloody battlefield considered a victory? What other form of athletic activity so parallels our deliberate and tortuous journey from the primordial sludge to the urban jungle? On what other field can bucktoothed WASPs, hardened city youths, and overgrown hayseeds engage in hand-to-hand combat and emerge, victorious or defeated, but better friends?

Hockey is just as exciting to watch as any other sport where the final score can end up 1-0. Baseball games are a good time. They’re kind of like a 10,000-person kegger where the only interruption to deep statistical debates is the occasional fist fight for the foul ball to the stands. As for basketball, it’s just like the Tour de France or an American Idol results show to me. The only part worth watching is the last few minutes.

So, in between yawning over various championship finals, and waiting for the pre-season, I will nurse my football deficiency with daydreams of long bombs from Russell to Heyward-Bay all day, and whisper my life’s motto softly, “Just win, baby.”

—Lisa