On my drive home from DC yesterday I had a doozy of a blog post swimming around in my head. It aimed to detail the trip itself, with the determined pace of the cars on the road and the Packers and Steelers flags flying from side-view mirrors, and suggest that the road made for a better pregame show than any of the slick-suited barking on television. It was to contain the line “the air was crisp with Super Bowl zeitgest,” and it would at once indict and celebrate the grand annual festival for capitalism that concludes the NFL season, investigating our near-religious adherence to rituals and ultimately condemning either the league’s owners or the citizens of the United States of America for their excesses. Something like that. It was to be a towering achievement, I promise.

Then the game happened, and the Packers won. One of the game’s best quarterbacks outplayed another of the game’s best quarterbacks, and there were some spectacular catches and hilarious commercials and epic halftime show blunders.

And then this morning, walking up Madison Avenue in the sunshine, I realized I felt nothing. Excited as I was for the Super Bowl on the length of the 5-hour drive, I no longer harbored any desire to pen the single most important piece of sportswriting of this century — or at least not if it pertained to last night’s game. The Super Bowl is what the Super Bowl is: Just another diversion to help us pass time until baseball season.

The Super Bowl has that in common with pretty much everything else besides baseball season.

On Twitter today, news trickles in from Port St. Lucie as the first Mets arrive in camp. Bullpen catcher Dave Racaniello is in the house. Josh Thole survived the perils of air travel. Things vaguely pertaining to baseball!

Baseball!

That is all.