For me up until about a few years ago, Super Bowl Sunday was not about the exuberant party, the million dollar advertisements, or even the game, unless it involved the New England Patriots (shut up, I’m from there). It was certainly about a game of football, but not the one the free world made a makeshift holiday over.
If you want to the gauge the maturity of an assortment of kids, ask them to play a game of touch football. It will give you a more accurate assessment than any bubble-sheet examination in a psychologist’s office.
For any generation of American suburbanites, touch football (along with Wiffle Ball) is as much of a pastime as trick-or-treating or fireworks on the Fourth of July. It was the activity of choice for innumerable summer afternoons, weekends in autumns before the first snowfall, and in springtime once lawns had transformed back from mud to grass.
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