(Super Bowl Sunday, 2014)

Saw an incredible hockey game yesterday morning. Back and forth, until they piled up a five-five tie and a frenzied overtime finished it off with a terrific Caps goal. Detroit slunk off, so close but so far. I love hockey, and that was a game, man, that was a game. No pathetic blow out. No horseshit music at halftime. No insanely expensive commercials. Just two hockey teams playing like their lives depended on it while the audience sat on the edge of their seats.

Some sports are real. And some sports have degenerated into show biz.

This isn’t the kind of thing you’re supposed to talk about on Linked-In. But they were. A site that’s all about business and commerce and ratings and climbing up the ladder, and everybody is talking about the Super Bowl, and especially about the commercials. Sports as seen through commercials. Or maybe commercials as sports. I know there was actual sports involved. There were two teams and a cloud of Astroturf dust. Apparently, on LinkedIn, that was incidental to the real action, the commercials. I thought about the hockey I’d seen the day before. Those teams showed up on that ice yesterday to play a hockey game. These teams seemed to show up at the Super Bowl to sell Budweiser and Doritos. What was the score, 43-8? That’s not even a contest, not even pretending to be. That’s just a bunch of guys running around a field to fill in time between commercials. And I didn’t even watch the game. I read about the commercials in the news. In fact I read about the commercials before they were even aired. Somehow people have made a contest out of the commercials. There was pre-game debate about who would have the best commercial. Stop and think about that.

Or stop and think about this: “The ad touched the depths of my soul,” says Char B., a middle school language-arts teacher from Livonia, Michigan, on LinkedIn. “Nothing reaches raw emotion like the love of animals.”

A beer commercial touched the depths of her soul.