For many, football, like baseball and basketball, gives pleasure and meaning to our ordinary lives. Football helps us identify with something bigger than ourselves. The sport arouses powerful emotions, including joy and exuberance. Football provides heroes. Audiences know when to cheer and when to be silent.
Football increasingly defines the seasonality of American life.
Except for Christmas and Easter, we mark our lives by games, playoffs, and bowl competitions, not by Lent, Pentecost, and the rest of the church year. Unless we're watchful, football can become our religion. A secular society substitutes other practices and beliefs for authentic faith. They were fanatical about public spectacle. Every decent sized city had its stadium.