E-Mail This Article to a Friend RANT American gothic BY CHRIS WRIGHT

Forget baseball. Forget basketball. If there is a sport that truly captures the American spirit, it’s football. American football, that is, not the game that the rest of the world calls football, the one that is actually played with one’s feet. Only the Americans, after all, would ditch a perfectly good game, invent a perfectly dreadful game to replace it, and then call that dreadful game by the same name as the good one. That is the spirit of the New World.

Football fans are the modern-day equivalent of the Pilgrims — those hardy folk who landed on the shores of a strange land and encountered bad weather, hostile natives, and chronic food shortages, and who, instead of hightailing it back to England, looked around and said, "Great! Let’s stay!" If nothing else, Americans know how to make the best of a terrible situation. This became clear to me recently when I attended my first Patriots game. It was against Cleveland. I think.

I knew I was in trouble when I started longing for TV ads. And not only during the trillions of minutes when the players milled around doing nothing. Even when a pack of heavily armored fatsos would go plunging forward an inch, when the rest of the crowd went berserk, banging their noisemakers and spilling Bud down each other’s necks — even then I found myself gazing at the JumboTron, hoping against hope that Bernie & Phyl would come along to lend a little zip to the proceedings.

In fairness, I was situated quite a way from the playing field — a mile or so by my estimation. When I wasn’t staring at the JumboTron, I whiled away the hours gazing down at the birds who flew by. Sometimes I would amuse myself by trying to guess which direction the rain would go next. Once it went upward — that was something. But that’s what you get for sitting in the cheap seats, I guess. Ours were only $65 apiece. A bargain.

The problem was, it all seemed meaningless to me. Someone would throw the ball, or try to run with the ball, and then everyone would fall down. At least, I think that’s what was happening — I couldn’t actually see the ball. People around me yelled things like, "Pump fake! Hitch and go! Hitch and go!" But I don’t think anyone truly understands football. This, after all, is a sport whose rules stipulate, "Whenever the ball becomes dead on or outside the hash mark, it is placed on its respective hash mark."

Which may explain why nobody seemed to be paying attention to the game. They were up and down, running to the concession stand, or high-fiving each other for no apparent reason, or simply yammering into their cell phones. Afterward, the rain coming down with depressing insistence, these same people stood about consuming soggy hamburgers. Some of them threw soggy footballs. There was nothing else to do.

It took my friends and me two hours to escape the quagmire of a parking lot where, for the low price of $35, we had stranded the car. Oddly, there was not a single scream of fear and frustration from the crowd. This, it occurred to me then, is why the terrorists will never break the will of these people. People who sit in the freezing rain, who squander hundreds of dollars and dozens of hours to watch a game whose rules would have given Einstein a headache — and who enjoy themselves into the bargain. That’s backbone. That’s America.