It’s the be-all and end-all

We are up to Super Bowl 45 now, or XLV to our Roman readers, and the general acceptance of it as a great event surpasses Obama numbers on his Inauguration Day.

What’s not to like about a big football game to watch, and the grand parties it creates? If we can have a holiday for our independence, why not one for our love of pro football?

On some level, we understand that the Super Bowl overwhelmed the concept of sport years ago and became the grandest marketing scheme of all. The NFL isn’t a sports brand. It’s the sports brand. We’d have to lock ourselves in a box to avoid all the commercials, sound bites and newspaper stories. If the NFL ever had any game tickets to sell to the public, it wouldn’t even need to try. The media’s extensive coverage would handle that.

If the NFL is the top beneficiary of this grand game and all that surrounds it, the media is certainly No. 2 at the trough. We try hard and talk bravely. But at Super Bowl time, we are right there grazing alongside those about whom we write and broadcast. It’s nearly impossible to avoid the lure of business trumping the journalism.

Most of this is fine, not life-threatening. This will be a fun Sunday in February -- it used to be January and probably will be March one of these years -- when you can wave your Terrible Towel or wear your Cheesehead. It is entertainment, we deserve to be entertained, and when it comes to sports in this country we are fairly shallow, anyway. Our team may feature nitwits, jerks and an occasional sexual assaulter, but they’re our nitwits and jerks and assaulters. So rah-rah, home team.

But Sunday, while we watch Madison Avenue spend $5 billion on commercials and we root for Green Bay or Pittsburgh -- or both if we have commitment issues -- it would be constructive to understand what the Super Bowl has done to the sports psyche in the United States.

It is the poster boy for what we have become. It creates the kind of massive, momentous extravaganza of ending that we now seem to think we need on all levels. It sets the tone from pony leagues to the BCS. Winning isn’t just important, it is also dancing girls and rock bands and four tons of confetti.

There once was a time, believe it or not, when high school teams played their schedule and stopped when it was over. Somebody had won the championship, or several had shared it. The rest had tried hard and come up short. That was it. No playoffs. No wild cards. Nobody was seeded. Everybody was satisfied.

College football was similar. A great regular season may have gotten you into a bowl game, and the bowl game was a one-shot reward for success.

College basketball had a smaller NCAA and a meaningful NIT. Both were important, but neither was pushed to be all-inclusive or monthlong circuses. Neither prompted ticker-tape-parade endings. John Wooden won a lot of titles, took a lot of pats on the back and came home.

Now, everything has to be a Super Bowl. The connotation is unmistakable.

Winning a little bit, or even a lot, isn’t good enough. Trying hard and doing as well as you can isn’t even worth lip service. Success is measured now by a postseason, which necessitates more winning, which necessitates more trumpets and parades. If we get all this, we finally feel good about ourselves. Anything less brings tears of failure.

Our children watch the Super Bowl and see the ultimate extravagance of winning and horror of losing. Nobody tosses confetti at them after the piano recital or the debate team victory.

It isn’t that sports achievement shouldn’t be celebrated. It just shouldn’t be made into something so big and disproportionate to its value in society that all perspective is lost.

Good parenting handles all this, assuming the parents themselves aren’t as taken in by all this as their children. Does Super Bowl syndrome beget Little League dad?

There is no turning back here, there is only hope for recognition and understanding.

Money and marketing and glitz and glamour have long since taken over blocking and tackling and shooting and rebounding as that which matters most. It is unthinkable to have the Lakers win it all and not have a massive parade.

But the granddaddy of them all remains the Super Bowl.

If we are not careful, it will razzle and dazzle us all, once again, into thinking that anything less than winning, accompanied by choirs and balloons and jet fly-overs, is failure.

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bill.dwyre@latimes.com