The opening game — Saints at Packers, the past two Super Bowl champions, Thursday night — was engraved in the minds of fans. Nothing could get in its way. Nothing.
The lockout of midsummer is long gone. The players got an extra day or two out of the brutal sun of training camp. These people, the players and the owners, generate too much money to shut down a sport over a percentage point here or there.
The seasonal return of the king even loomed over what one would like to think are more important issues, like a presidential talk. A week ago the White House tried to arrange a speech by President Obama about the pressing issue of the day, jobs and the economy, but Representative John A. Boehner, the speaker of the House, balked because of the Republican candidates’ debate that night.
All of a sudden, this became more than party politics and good manners and jockeying for 2012. When the president’s speech was moved to Thursday, the White House found the need to address the massive shadow of King Football. “I can assure all you football fans that he will be completed before kickoff,” the White House spokesman, Jay Carney, said on Thursday.
Obama is scheduled to speak at 7 p.m. Eastern, and the Saints-Packers game is set for 8:30 p.m. But that was not enough.
For the people out there who fret that Obama is not a football-loving manly man real American, Carney reassured the multitudes that he had the same priorities as everybody else in this great land of ours.
“It means he will have the opportunity to watch the game, like millions of other Americans,” Carney said.
Notice the press secretary said “opportunity.” Personally, I’d like to think the president will rush home, shuck the business suit, get into his jeans, and read a bedtime story to his daughters rather than watch large people give each other concussions. And later maybe he could slip into the gym to shoot baskets to work off the brutal load of stress.
Even the reassurance that Obama has the right priorities was not enough. Everybody in petulant America wants the man to do more, something else, better, right now, get mad, get even, solve the problem with a catchphrase or a snap of his fingers. But at the same time, some football fans on the Web have been brooding that the speech on jobs will somehow force television to skimp on pregame videos of brain-rattling tackles from last season.
Fear not. The show will go on, from now until the Super Bowl. The N.F.L. has a 10-year labor contract. The average franchise is worth $1.022 billion, according to Forbes. All is right with the world, despite rising medical evidence that a frightening proportion of players are developing dementia and dying young, from brain damage. The N.F.L. tinkers with the rules, while King Football rumbles onward.
The fans have the right to anticipate the new season, with dramas and loyalties varying from city to city. The N.F.L., with its national network contracts, has the fabulous karma of a tiny city in northern Wisconsin winning the Super Bowl. There is nothing comparable in any other American team sport. The survival of Green Bay is as much fun to ponder as a muddy game on the tube. Los Angeles still does not have a football team. (Or a baseball team, some would say.) The Colts may have to do without Peyton Manning. Like him or loathe him, Michael Vick has made one of the great comebacks in American sport.
And in New York, we get two plots from two very different teams.
The Giants, with a huge swath of fans in the region, have won one Super Bowl with Tom Coughlin and stuck with him through some disappointing seasons. With a third generation of Maras and a second generation of Tisches, the Giants take the long view.
The Jets have forced New Yorkers to drop the stereotype of the goofy, vaguely cursed franchise that, between sporadic moments of glory, would find a way to self-destruct. In the era of Woody Johnson, Mike Tannenbaum and Rex Ryan, the Jets have become, dare one say this, consistent.
Ryan ensures they will always play with swagger, and sometimes act in bad taste, but give them their due, they back it up, with a locker full of characters allowed to be themselves. In the first two seasons of Ryan and Mark Sanchez, the Jets have a 20-12 record and have played in two conference championship games.
All over this football-loving nation, a new season begins Thursday night. The real world has given its solemn promise not to intrude.
