For years, there have been two games on Thanksgiving and no more. But this year, the NFL broadcasted a third game in the evening, just at the time when we were sending out to the deli for two more 12-packs and clearing out of the dining room so the womenfolk can start clearing the table and washing the dishes and putting the leftovers away and doing all those other things that bring them so much joy. (That’s my story and I’m sticking to it; just don’t tell my wife I said so.)

And this game was not the usual NFL-issue Thanksgiving fare. It was Denver and Kansas City, one of the league’s greatest rivalry games between two of its better teams with actual playoff implications hanging in the balance. This was a game worthy of Sunday Night Football, the league’s new premier stage. It was a game that we’d watch even if Aunt Edna had already gone home. It was a game that would induce us to switch to coffee just so we could stay awake long enough to watch it.

But there was a catch: It was on the new NFL Network, and great swathes of the country, including everyone who gets cable from Time Warner Cable, Cablevision and Charter Communications couldn't see it. That’s because the NFL wanted television providers to provide the channel for free on basic cable — as if anything is free on basic cable or cable by any other name — instead of as a premium channel. Yet it wanted the cable companies to fork — or shovel — over 70 cents per customer for use of the signal. Time Warner and other companies refused to pay that much, so as usually happens when titans of entertainment get to feuding, the customer gets nothing.

As one who has every channel known to humankind except the one I want to watch, which in this case is the NFL Network, I was among those who couldn't watch the first Thanksgiving Day game actually worth watching since the Decatur Staleys played the Dayton Triangles — or was it the Rock Island Independents?

I felt like a child who’s had a candy bar waved in my face, put within a nanometer of my grasp, and then snatched away with great guffaws of sadistic laughter. Or a young woman in the throes of infatuation who weeps when the FTD guy delivers a dozen red roses only to open the card and find they’re for her roommate — from the weeping woman's boyfriend.

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I felt cheated, betrayed, scorned, abused. It was cruel. It was inhuman. It was monstrously evil. It was quite rude.

“Here’s your game,” the NFL told me. “But you can’t watch it.”

Har. Har. Har.

So it is that we have no need of lesser turkeys this year. We have instead the NFL and its new network, the biggest turkeys of them all.

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