Is sports really just another form of entertainment? People like to say it's "just a business" like any other or that it's "nothing more than a pastime". But I don't believe it.
Here at the Super Bowl, where the Denver Broncos and Atlanta Falcons are set to square off in America's sporting holy grail, evidence of obsession is just too palpable. People just don't get this absorbed by a "business".
How do you explain, for example, "the barrel man"? Tim McKernan is a big fan of the Denver Broncos. He certainly has the qualifications for superfandom having just been inducted into the newly-formed Visa Hall of Fans in Canton, Ohio - right there next door to the real Football Hall of Fame.
A hall of fans? More like a Hall of the Terminally Obsessed. Tim is a gravelly-voiced bear of a man, with a white beard and a mane of long white hair which he frequently combs. When he walks down the streets of Miami, people stop him and ask for his autograph.
What's he famous for? He wears a barrel to Broncos games - attached by a pair of suspenders - and nothing else except for a pair of orange boots. At least nothing that he'll admit to. Not even during Denver winters when the temperature has dipped to as low as minus 20F with driving snow, will he wear so much as a T-shirt.
"I lasted till the third quarter," he concedes of the coldest game he braved in a barrel. He doesn't worry about the temperature, though. Only the opposing fans when he's cheering his beloved Broncos on the road. Whenever there's a problem, alcohol is usually involved, he says. McKernan's been kicked, punched, knocked over and verbally abused. Many a full beer can has been thrown at his head.
McKernan does this out of love for his team. But, at the same time, he's really very much a part of the sports machine. He's now a celebrity in his own right around Denver, and for that matter, the rest of the US. He writes a column for a local newspaper and works the sports radio and TV talk show circuit.
Nowhere is the coal that feeds the beast of America's sports passion more evident than here at the media centre of the Super Bowl. This is the central nervous system, ground zero of obsession.
The media numbers boggle the mind: 3,000 accredited US journalists, more than 400 foreign reporters - all here to dissect and analyse a single game. Sure it's true that 800 million people around the world will be watching, but this is not the Olympics - it's just a single, two-hour, usually-quite-boring, game. But while the print reporters bash away at their computers, slouched over screens and surrounded by newspapers, empty Coke cans and stale nachos, the real action is next door. That's where the all-sports radio stations broadcast live, day and night.
These guys are amazing to watch. They're a hardy bunch, about as far from prima donnas as they come. They don't need quiet to concentrate, that's for certain. In a hotel lobby filled with onlookers, pizza delivery boys, groupies, former pro players and at times a salsa band booming in the background, they don't miss a beat. In fact, all the distractions seem to help.
Mike North heads up the Monsters of the Midday Show, allsports WSCR's top-rated show from Chicago. He got his break nine years ago when he was 37: at the time he was selling hot dogs on the street. "Now that I'm doing this it would be hard to go back to my old life," he says.
His show puts a limit on callers; they're allowed on-air only once a week "otherwise we'd have the same guys on the phone to us every day," he says. North says he loves sports but is not obsessed by them. It's a fine line, but he swears he has never crossed it.
Someone like the Barrel Man might be over the line, though. How else do you explain not missing a single Broncos home game in 20 years - even after suffering a heart attack during the 1989 preseason?
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