This weekend, Labor Day weekend, is for many NFL fans a final weekend of peace.  A final weekend without trying to appease the gods of suburbia on Saturday in a desperate attempt to free the Sunday calendar. A final weekend of slept-through Saturday nights, free from the mind’s breakdown of covering the deep middle and protecting the blind side. A final weekend without the nerves and rituals that accompany our particular Sunday experiences and the Monday morning hangover that follows.

Peace.

Football is America’s greatest sport for a great many reasons but the most often overlooked is the simplicity of its schedule. Once a week. One time a week a team gets a chance to prove itself. The other six days leave the fans and media scrambling for information and answers, desperate to know who did what and why and can it be fixed. So much of the drama of the NFL happens off the field and outside the locker room. It happens in the minds of the fans as they sit at the work desks on Wednesday and relive the dropped ball or missed field goal or phantom holding call. It stews and builds and boils and then…

Sunday.

It releases in the experience of watching your team play once again.

Catharsis.

And then the boardwalk wheel is spun once again.

This is the final weekend of peace, the final weekend before the drama and I urge you to enjoy it. We football obsessives don’t know quite how engulfed we become in the game for these next 4-5 months.

Ask your wife….

or girlfriend…

…or boyfriend…

…or priest or mechanic or video store clerk…

…or prostitute you visit at the airport Hyatt on Monday nights.

Ask them how you behave on a Monday following a victory. Ask them how it changes after a loss.

Maybe it’s immature. Maybe it’s not. But it isn’t normal. Not to those who don’t understand.

This weekend, enjoy normal. Enjoy the peace. Around 12:00 pm CT Sunday take a cup of tea and biscuit out into the yard and discuss the mess in Syria or the last time you had a really good quiche.

Enjoy the peace. It ends next week.