By Dan Forward

know no one has proven that Ray Lewis is a murderer. But I also know that no one has proven that he is not a murderer. Oh, boo hoo, blah, blah, that’s not how the justice system works. I know it’s not! But it’s enough to make me happy that the Ravens aren’t in the Super Bowl.

Aaaand freeze. If you’re anything like me at this moment, you’re shifting uncomfortably at your desk because you think you’re about to be exposed as a person who knows almost nothing about sports. Also if you’re anything like me you’re not wearing pants at your desk, because who’s going to be knocking at the door at this hour? The King of America? Give us a minute, Your Majesty. We’re just getting comfortable over here.

Whatever you may think about football—and I’m looking most severely at you, people who call it “American football”—the Super Bowl is important because it more or less decides which group of people gets to share the crown of King of America for the next year. A lot of cheat sheets come out around playoff time that try to give you, the uneducated (or, rather, the educated about real things) loser, the essential facts about football so you can speak about it without sounding like a total nerd. As my professors are fond of saying about my schoolwork, “This misses the mark.”

No one cares if you don’t know the difference between encroachment and offsides penalties, or where Danny Woodhead went to college. The refs tell you the answer to the first question, and if the second question comes up, you squint your eyes, make a hissing sound (with your mouth, creep), hold your forehead, and say, “Ooh, why can’t I remember what school he played for?” and then look it up on your phone. The only indispensable stat in the whole game is that Vince Wilfork weighs 325 pounds.

This guide is devoted to storylines. Like Air Bud: Golden Receiver, but ones you can admit to knowing about. I promise there will be no statistical nonsense. This playoffs season has been full of storylines. Inane, yes. Offensive, mostly. But also easy to grasp, generally. Now sit back in your chair. Relax. Set a bag of Goldfish in your flavor of choice on your desk. If you get chilly, pick your pants up off the floor and wrap them around your shoulders like a shawl. And allow me to tell you a story that, once understood, can be the key to sounding at least as smart as an ESPN commentator or one of the more highly evolved species on Super Bowl Sunday.

It’s the story of the 2011 Patriots, the least detestable team in the AFC playoffs.

Once upon a time, there was a football team in New England that went a league-best 14-2 in the regular season and then lost its first playoff game to a team coached by a guy who likes feet. Like, really likes them. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. That same losing team came back this year and managed to finish 13-3. Though if you’re counting losses by how many times the team disappointed or depressed its fan base with an unconvincing win, it took home a W maybe twice, with most of that goodwill chalked up to a general seething hatred for Tim Tebow.

Visionary Romantic poet William Blake said that John Milton, author of the sexiest depiction of Satan in English literature, was “of the devil’s party without knowing it,” meaning that though Milton wrote Paradise Lost in praise of all things heavenly, he couldn’t help but make Lucifer a total badass. America was of the devil’s party this year. The devil is Bill Belichick. I think we’ve always known whose side we’re on up in Boston, and we’re not ashamed of it, but more people joined us recently just to see the chastity-having, after-touchdown-praying, runningback-as-quarterback-pretending goofball Timothy T. returned into the dust from whence he was made. (Bible joke.) Bill obliged us all once, then again in the divisional playoffs.

This Patriots triumph came a week after Tebow’s Broncos engineered their 256th come-from-behind victory of the season against the heavily favored Pittsburgh Steelers, a team most famous to me for being headed by a quarterback whose Wikipedia page has more than a thousand words dedicated to the sexual assault allegations leveled against him. I’m not going to pronounce judgment when the courts didn’t, but I’m just saying that that’s more words than most topics get, total. I think this was a game of rock, paper, scissors that the Patriots luckily won. Pittsburgh’s sexual misconduct would have beaten New England’s complete lack of pity for any other team or individual or puppy, which beat Denver’s altar-boy flare, which in turn turned off the Steelers.

Against all odds, except the real ones that count that actually favored New England, the Patriots beat the Ravens the next week. Did you know Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston? But for some reason hated it here? He called us “Frog-pond-ians.” I guess he thought that that was like an insult or something. Most people think of him as belonging to Baltimore, though, and hence the Ravens’ name comes from his most famous poem. I like to think that in the future I have already used the iPhone 7’s time travel technology to send Poe a message about the missed field goal that allowed us to win. Side note: Linebacker Ray Lewis has only 369 words about his conviction for obstruction of justice in a freaking murder case, so I guess that makes him more likeable than Roethlisberger?

Are you still awake? The story isn’t finished, friend. Who will win the Super Bowl between the Patriots and the New York Giants? Will the Giants again tear victory right from under Belichick’s fangs, as they did in 2008? Or will, as I predict, our conscientious coach have already strapped Eli Manning to a table below a slowly descending bladed pendulum before the game even starts, having taken a particularly delicious page out of Poe’s playbook?

Whatever the outcome, you can relax after the Super Bowl. There’s nothing else to talk about. I think there are very good arguments that basketball is not a sport, baseball is not a sport, and hockey is not even a thing.

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