Eric has decided he’s a cooler. His position is that his presence in the room does measurable harm to the Seahawks and that the decent thing to do is remove himself. I don’t believe a word of it. I’ve also noticed it’s a very convenient belief for a man who doesn’t want to watch football, so I let him keep that position.

So Sundays are mostly me, the Seahawks and popcorn. That’s the entire production.

He likes to point out that we have reverse roles in this house and he’s right. I can tell you who’s starting at left tackle for teams I have no reason to care about. Baseball too. He couldn’t name five players and has no interest in learning. I’m okay with that too.

Here’s the part I can’t explain. I don’t like violence. Not in movies, not on the news, not anywhere. And football is a violent sport. I know this. I watch it anyway, and not politely. I watch it the way other people watch their team – up off the couch, hollering at a screen.

The closest I’ve gotten to an answer is border collies.

A border collie is a wolf with the last step removed. The stalking, the staring, the running, the gathering, all of it still there. Only the part where it eats the sheep got taken out and replaced with a whistle. And the dog isn’t sad about it. That’s the happiest that animal is ever going to be.

Football looks like that to me. Everything a fight is made of, right up to the hit, and then somebody blows a whistle and spots the ball and it doesn’t mean what it would mean anywhere else.

That’s what I tell myself, anyway.

It probably has more to do with being nine years old on a couch next to my brother.

Rick is fourteen years older than me. He taught me the game. The positions, the rules, who was good and why. I couldn’t tell you a single play from any of it. What I remember is being handed something by somebody I thought was very grown up, and being able to keep up.

The Seahawks isn’t my only team. Green Bay came down through my mother’s side, but it stuck because of Favre and Rodgers. Both of them played like the rules were a suggestion somebody had made to them once. Both of them were right, in that rebellion, often enough to get away with it. I love that in a person.

The Seahawks won the Super Bowl in February of 2014 and I watched it at a party in the ‘hood in Tigard. People talk at parties. People stand in front of things. I try at those and I never manage to pull off watching. I have been quietly sore about that particular one for twelve years.

This last February I was squarely planted on the couch for every minute of it. Loud whenever it was warranted. Nobody standing in front of anything. Eric watched too, I think. I couldn’t swear to it.

They open against New England again tonight. I have the game paused to finish writing this, which I think tells you everything.