Can you feel it? Football season is here.

A s Andy Williams would no doubt have readily agreed, this is the most wonderful time of the year. At long last, we are on the cusp. The orchestra is tuning up. The fly-by-wire cameras are being tested. Al Michaels is being carefully unfrozen in his chamber. Can you feel it? Football season is here.

I know, I know. A whole month remains until the substantial games begin. But, as in opera, the overture’s adumbrations are an integral part of the act. This is the period of chatter, and of prediction, and of optimism unsullied by fact. Here, in the antechamber, each team is still its best self — with no losses, no injuries, no boneheaded mistakes to soil its reputation. 17-0? It’s possible! Quite literally, it’s possible. In sports, imagination can be a hell of a drug.

In August, we convene. We try out our trash talk, clear our road games with our wives, send invitations to our fantasy leagues, and refine our theories — again and again and again. There are just two universal icebreakers in American life: “Tell me about your kids,” and “So, are you a Colts fan?” One of them is operative all year round; the other is activated summarily in the middle of the summer sun. Socially, September through February confers easy mode upon men who converse in abstractions: Buy a stranger a beer and ask him if his team’s offensive line can hold, and, ten minutes later, you’ll have bonded as if you fought together at Anzio.

At either end of the horseshoe sit voices that disapprove. Football is too violent, too dangerous, too much of a distraction. It’s a Roman circus — which diverts us from purer pursuits — or a facsimile of masculinity — which habitually keeps us out of the gym. This is all nonsense. Sports are good for the soul, and football is the champion among sports. During the pandemic, when most sports were canceled, the week lost its rhythm. For a while, it was if a noisy clock had been unceremoniously removed from the house. Modern though we may be, we still navigate our weeks by the stars. For months, the sky was bereft, and, when eventually that changed, the lights that came back on were peculiar and dim. The games were played, but with no soundtrack. The stadia made no noise. The atmosphere was dead. The love was gone from the affair. “For it so falls out,” wrote Shakespeare,

That what we have we prize not to the worth
Whiles we enjoy it; but being lack’d and lost,
Why, then we rack the value, then we find
The virtue that possession would not show us
Whiles it was ours.

Evidently, the Bard was not a Jets fan.

There is a lot of money in football these days, which, indeed, makes it more of a spectacle. But the instincts on display long predate all that. In the game’s nascent days, young men with prospects in business and society were desperate to take part, unremunerated, despite the serious threat of injury of death. What, one wonders, could have persuaded a Harvard man who was heir to a textile mill to run, undaunted, at the flying wedge? Understand that, and you will understand all. Having awoken from a coma after his near-death experience on the field, Damar Hamlin’s first words were, “Did we win?” QED.

Utopians like to imagine that the world is a sandbox, in which any one thing can be rearranged without broader consequence. In truth, it is a Rubik’s cube. There is no such thing as “America without football.” America is football, and football is America; each helped to create the other in ways that are tough to unravel. Cricket is an imperial game, played wherever the British Victorians elected to roam. Soccer and tennis are global. But football, in its quintessence, must be played here in the United States. The pope must live in Rome, and football must live in America — in cathedrals sanctioned by the creed. For better or for worse, there is too much ersatz liturgy in the encounter for the service to be exported en masse. The anthem, the flyover, the announcements, the periodical call-and-response — these are meant to be delivered in an accent born in Pittsburgh, or New Orleans, or Kansas City. So it is written, so it shall be done — until those agonizing zeroes herald the end of the fourth quarter.

And then? The weekly cycle — familiar to millions. Monday, for celebration or mourning. Tuesday, for the emotional afterglow. Wednesday brings the reset. Thursday is for analysis of the next foe, Friday is for unearned confidence, Saturday for unjustified doubt, and then Sunday — glorious Sunday — brings the battle to seat 107BB.