Yesterday (February 7, 2010) was the superbowl the pinnacle of the NFL season, this is where it all ends at, this is what all the training, all the weight lifting, all the sprinting and strategising is supposed to lead to. The funny thing is up until a few (call it 5 years) ago, Jamaica really didn't care much about the superbowl. No really I'm telling the truth, American Football is quite possibly one of the most unpopular sports in Jamaica, the only major American sport Jamaicans watch less of than American football, is probably Ice Hockey and Baseball. We just dont take to those sports very well... I dunno, maybe there is some underlying reason somewhere, but I dont know it. Fact is if it wasn't football (soccer), Basketball, cricket or track and field, we just didnt know/care about it

Well actually I shouldn't say we, because I (and a few members of my family) are the exception in that we LOVE the NFL and have been watching it for as far back as I can remember. So far back as a matter of fact that I can remember clearly the Cowboys (my team of choice) winning the 3 superbowls in the 1990s with Troy Aikman and Emmit Smith and Deion Sanders forming a team that was more or less unstoppable and easily took the championship (also I can remember the decade and a half of suffering after the 1996 championship where we were absolute rubbish).

But there was one thing which remained constant throughout that entire period of me watching NFL... I was the only person who was really and truly interested in what was happening. All the way up to University level whenever I brought up the topic it would be met with groans of anger/frustration/annoyance or just general negative feelings and I would eventually have to go back to whatever we were talking about before. Eventually I learned to just stick to the 3 or so people outside of my family who actually know a bit about the sport and I'd be ok. But recently a strange thing started to happen, people started talking about the NFL in public.

To me, it started with a program called "Full House Fridays" which close to the end of the program during the NFL season, a guy named Tony Scott would come on and he and the host would make their weekly picks and discuss their reasons.  The thing that surprised me most about this program was not just the fact that they were discussing the NFL, but the fact that they were actually making pretty good predictions based on good facts, and did jobs comparable to what the ESPN, Showtime, and HBO guys did. While this was surprising to me, it still wasn't anything significant as the topic was still a taboo.

But over the years I started to realize something happening, more and more people started having superbowl parties and superbowl specials at sportsbars throughout the place. People started to talk about the NFL more often and people started speaking about the teams which they believed were the best. This was when I realized, that something had changed, something drastic had happened and people started to realize just how brilliant a sport the NFL was... or, maybe people just needed a reason to celebrate in these hard times and the superbowl provided just the right sort of celebration.

Whatever the reason I hope it continues into next year's season and superbowl because I really enjoyed having an actual conversation regarding the superbowl and somebody actually understanding me to some extent, and that made this superbowl the one of the best for me.

**taken from mailonline

Oh and congratulations to the Saints on their superbowl victory. I had predicted that the saints would be victorious from earlier in the season and it seems that yet another of my predictions came through (I'm very good at this I should add).  Hopefully the Cowboys will do me as proud as the Saints did the city of New Orleans next season.