I hate people like me.

People who measure time in miles walked to school, in a driving snow storm, on a broken leg, with a 30-pound sack of books and a lunch-bag half full of leftover spam.

People like that. Old people.

People who recall being asked if they could use a couple tickets to Super Bowl 2.

“Yeah, nobody wants ‘em. You have any interest?”

I took them, since I had the weekend off and had nothing else to do.

Only one difference in the first scenario and the second, far as I can tell; immediately after the first tale, the following declaration appears: “You don’t know how good you have it today”.

After the second, it changes dramatically. “I didn’t know how good I had it back then.”

We are on the verge of Number 43, except they don’t calibrate them that way any more. Haven’t since IV, I do believe. An enormous crowd will gather in Arizona for this one, as it has for the last XL or so. If they are fortunate enough to find a ticket, it will cost them their first-born and his inheritance. Those billions who choose to remain home will constitute the largest television audience of the year, barely edging out “Dancing with the Stars” repeats. Many simply there to muddle through the football until the commercials appear, commercials that will cost corporate America millions of dollars a second.

It is a phenomenon that has outlived every other except Christmas. And every year, without question, my mind drifts (another phenomenon that we’ll discuss later) to those early days when there were actually empty seats for the annual Packers “Lamb Slaughter” festival.

I was a fledgling sportswriter back then, meandering through the state of Florida, working at this newspaper and that, taking aim at Miami where surely I would spend the rest of my days. Where else would anyone want to move past that? (Unfortunately, I didn’t have the foresight to study Spanish so my tenure was brief but rewarding.)

We will make this story mercifully brief. We had a coin-flip at the Miami News that winter of 1968 to see which writer would cover the Colts and what poor slob would get the woeful Jets. I lost.

And won.

I was there for the great “guarantee”, there as Namath held court poolside, there for remarkable game itself, there in the locker room after. Just two of us, in fact, a writer from the New York Times and me, waited a half hour til Namath found his way out of the shower and back to his locker. It was, obviously, well worth our patience.

Imagine all of that today. I’ve covered dozens of Super Bowls since then, been swept away in the raging media sea and the corporate tsunami, overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of what it’s become.

I had no idea how good I had it?

I do now.

Jim Huber