As careful readers know, Super Bowl Sunday (SBS) is not an official holiday, but rather a cultural holiday, a time when our behavior transcends the calendar. It's a holiday because we act as if it is one.

Other cultural holidays include March 18, when we tighten moorings loosed on St. Patrick's Day and give IV drips of Alka-Seltzer some time to work; Dec. 26 when Christmas is on a Thursday, so we can celebrate that we saved one day of vacation; and, of course, our birthdays because, hey, bottom line, it's about us, right?

I personally consider the first day of baseball season a cultural holiday, too, a day that should be immune to the rigors of school attendance rules or the parochialism of workplace personal day policies.

But no cultural holiday rocks like SBS. We host tribal gatherings (body paint optional), we eat and drink with bacchanalian enthusiasm, we compare pixels and high definitions, we duel with remotes at 20 paces (distance from the Lazy Boy to the big screen).

We handicap the commercials, $2.7 million-a-minute mini art forms, unveiled before the nation's largest annual television-viewing audience. We boogie at halftime this year to Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers simultaneously praying for and against a wardrobe malfunction.

Oh, yeah, and sometime during the holiday, between the food and the frivolity and the Budweiser and the Barcaloungers, a football game will transpire.

Some will even notice.

New clambake

This year, the game has some potential TVQ chops. A New England Patriot win would complete a perfect 19-0 season, and, according to many who have passed themselves off as experts the last two weeks, make them the sport's best team ever.

Conversely, a New England loss to the New York Giants would make the Giants the best team wait a minute the best team this year. That would make New England well 18-1, I guess.

In a sport regularly in danger of being talked to death, I'm not sure which scenario would survive the flood of chatter sure to follow.

But enough about football. We have a holiday to celebrate. Party on.

SBS is a relatively new clambake, this being Super Bowl XLII. That's 42. I had to look it up, those Roman numerals growing more annoying every year.

The big game is a mere child compared to baseball, whose 104th World Series (CIV) will be played this year. The NBA started crowning champions in 1947. The National Hockey League began to hand out Stanley Cups to its champs in 1917.

Any way you do the math, Sunday's 4X10+2 championship game called a Super Bowl is a young phenomenon.

Glacial survivor

For some, SBS means the beginning of the end of winter. Ironic, too, that a sport, which starts in the suffocating heat of summer, ends within a long fungo shot to spring training.

Further irony, too, that to make the Super Bowl, most teams must survive glacial playoff games, nasty affairs that chill bones, ice lungs and glaze playing fields. Then they show up in the rarefied February air of the desert, where they actually play the game indoors.

A chunk of actual viewers will pay little attention to the game, but then if Fox attracts a record audience conventional wisdom says it will 95 million will be tuning in. The record for a Super Bowl TV audience is 94.08 million, set in 1996. Last year's telecast checked in at 93.2 million, the second-largest audience ever.

Of course, nobody asked the 94 million viewers in 1996 if they were tuning in to watch the Steelers and Cowboys or that "I Love You, Man" commercial with Charlton Heston. Or maybe it was the halftime show. Or the food. On SBS, it doesn't matter.

That's because, like Christmas, Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July, some days are bigger than others simply because we have made them that way.

Happy holidays.

George Ayoub is senior writer at The Independent.