I am writing this sentence five days before the Super Bowl. So although the game may be over by the time you read this, I, Barry Lank from last Wednesday, do not know who won it. Nor do I care.

I wouldn't have cared either if our own local team, the Philadelphia Eagles, were still in contention. No matter who wins the Super Bowl – New England, St. Louis or, in an amazing upset, Dallas – it is a victory for me, because it means the football season is over.

If you have any pity to spare, give some to those of us who don't follow sports. We live in a world that confuses us. Our favorite TV shows get preempted. Our highways mysteriously get jammed at 2 p.m. on a Sunday. Our cars get flipped over and lit on fire if, foolishly, we park them downtown in a city with a good football team.

We suffer all this for something that does not even interest us. And if you don't know what that's like, try to imagine if your car windows were broken and your house defaced as the indirect result of a dog contest.

Oh, I've tried to follow the games. At various times, I have pretended to pay attention to basketball, football, soccer and boxing – though I still would rather watch paint dry, particularly if the producers from "Law & Order" wrote the script for it. I have had people explain the infield fly rule (repeatedly, for I retain none of it). I even have a friend who writes for Sports Illustrated. But he realizes that I do not understand half of what he's talking about. And I only hope things go well someday when he realizes that I also do not understand the other half.

"Why Barry," the reader is saying. "You're a woman." No, I am not, for even women care about sports more than I do. The biggest football fan I know had her last baby shower at a sports bar, and indulges an extreme devotion to the Washington Redskins – by which I mean that she still thinks they might pull it out this season.

The real question is why sports should be more of a problem than any other subject that doesn't interest me – chemistry, for example, or horticulture or astrology. The answer is that those other topics don't intrude upon people's lives in the same way. "The Simpsons" never gets preempted by a demonstration of ions. I have never endured a bombardment of commercials telling me the daffodils are particularly lovely this time of year. And I've never seen anyone beaten up by a drunken, pumped-up gang of Libras.

If you run for office, you must choose a favorite baseball team. If you go to a bar, you must watch a game there and give a full, incoherent report about it afterward to anyone who's too drunk to get away. Even if you're a bookish type, you're supposed to follow baseball – alleged to be a "thinking man's" game, perhaps because it is so excruciatingly dull that you end up thinking a lot about death.

To make matters worse, I have led what would be a charmed life if I cared about sports at all. When I lived in San Francisco in the 1980s, the 49ers owned football and we had a local World Series between the Giants and the Oakland Athletics. When I moved to New York in 1996, the Yankees starting winning the World Series again, and there I was for another local Series, between the Yankees and Mets. I moved to South Jersey in November 2001 and …‚ say, isn't that just before the 76ers charged toward the finals? Yes it is. And your welcome. I take credit for all these victories, for they occurred in order to annoy me.

And the sports never stop. Basketball season is starting up, then baseball kicks in, and before that's done, we're back to the gridiron clash of guys who graduated college with a C-minus average.

At the moment, however, there is peace. It is midnight at my apartment building, and a light drizzle falls outside my window. Yet I do not hear my neighbors screaming "Eagulllls!" Bars on South Street in Philadelphia have become quiet, wholesome places again where you can take the kids for shooters and tattoos. Everything has already begun settling back down to the manageable, lackluster sense of despair that I enjoy.

A football season is over. I have only 40 or 50 more of them to go before I never have to think about this again.