Go Steelers!

My favorite team, the Pittsburgh Steelers, will be playing in Super Bowl XLIII this Sunday. Like millions of other people, I will spend the evening watching the Steelers and the Arizona Cardinals battle it out to determine this season's champion. I would love for the Steelers to win their 6th Super Bowl!

As big a Steeler fan as I am, I sometimes wonder why we as a society are willing to spend so much time, energy, and money on something as apparently meaningless as football.

We fans watch games, participate in fantasy leagues, buy team paraphernalia, and engage in friendly rivalries with other teams' fans. Corporations sponsor luxury boxes, buy commercial time, and employ football players in advertising their products. Teams' hometowns contribute stadiums and infrastructure. On the whole, the amount of time, energy, and money spent on football is mind-boggling.

What is it about football that encourages us to make expenditure on such a scale?

Is it escapism? Football is entertainment that is available on television from the comfort of our recliners. We get to relax for a few hours, focusing on a game and clearing our minds of stress and worry.

Is it equality? Football builds bridges, such as across generational and socioeconomic divides. All of a team's fans are equal in fervor when the game goes especially well or especially poorly.

Maybe it's connection? Any two people in a team's hometown can find common ground by starting a conversation with, "How about that game?" Even more so, away from the team's hometown, otherwise strangers may smile or comment when they see each other wearing their team's emblem.

Or, perhaps, it is belonging. As a fan, I belong to a huge club that meets most Sundays for five months of the year. It's an amorphous and largely anonymous group, but it's a group nonetheless. And I belong.

The reasons we invest so much in football may include all of these, as well as others I haven't named.

Of course, I know that professional football is a business, that it wouldn't exist if it weren't profitable to the business owners and stakeholders. But we consumers pay for the "product" because it serves us in some way(s). The benefits we gain must be worth more to us than the time, energy, and money we spend on it, or we wouldn't make that investment.

On Sunday, I am not likely to think about these things as I cheer the Steelers on. But my curiosity is likely to persist as this game becomes just a memory: why do we invest so much in football, and what it would take to garner such interest in other endeavors, such as making the world a better place?