Mike Celizic

Ladies and gentlemen, start your recording devices, fire up your word processing programs, fetch the thesaurus and cancel all calls. It is Day I of Super Bowl Week. Let the hype begin.

There is no more wonderful — nor more inane — week in sports, or for that matter, in American popular culture. This is not an opinion, but fact. The Super Bowl is America’s secular holy day, a celebration it invented, nurtured, ritualized and is spreading across the planet. Observing it isn’t a choice, it’s a social obligation.

Even those who would sooner have hot needles driven under their nails than watch a football game will spend time this week talking about how they’re not going to watch it. No matter who you are and what you do, you can’t avoid it. My advice is to not even try.

It is wonderful because it consumes the nation and unites it. Man and woman, child and adult, black and white, red state and blue state, creationist and Darwinist, accountant and artist — they’re all sucked into the media maelstrom that is Super bowl Week.

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The rest of the sports world may as well take the week off for all the attention we’ll pay to it. I care if the Suns add to their winning streak, but not enough to watch their games, not this week. In baseball, let there be no trades of any significance. Let no coaches be fired or hired because we’re not going to pay attention.

It’s good that Tiger Woods is going to Dubai for a tournament there, because if he were playing in this country, we wouldn’t have time to watch.

Come to think about it, everything else can take the week off. No matter what you’re interested in, Super Bowl Week is going to leak through.

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If you go for pop culture instead of football, you’ll be sucked in anyway, because every star worth mentioning will be either going to Miami, talking about Miami or performing in Miami. If it’s business you’re into, the captains of industry will be there, too, as will politicians and everyone else who can score a ticket.

On Media Day, the players will face not just the sporting press but also MTV, VH1, BET and all the rest of the cable dial, including religious broadcasting stations eager to demonstrate that their deity is as eager to see the game as everyone else — and might even have a hand in deciding the winner. Ministers will work the Super Bowl into their sermons. Teachers will get it into their lesson plans, politicians will refer to it in speeches, news columnists will use it for their one sports reference of the year, lifestyle sections will devote acres of copy to how to throw a Super Bowl party.

You’ll learn how many miles of hot dogs will be served, how many gallons of beer will be swilled, how many buses will take how many visitors from how many hotels to how many parties.

Not a bit of this will make your life the least bit better. But neither will it make it worse, and it will be a pleasant diversion for a week.