I quickly learned what many Sunday widows already realized — that football is not a game but a religion, a metaphysical island of fundamental truth in a highly verbal, disguised society, a throwback of 30,000 generations of anthropological time. – Arnold J. Mandell, “A Psychiatric Study of Professional Football,” 1974 [An inte

Losing the Super Bowl is worse than death. You have to get up the next morning. – George Allen, quoted in J. Mitchell Perry & Steve Jamison, In the Zone: Achi

To love the Super Bowl, you only have to think what Januarys were like before it came along. – David N. Rosenthal, Time, 1982