ABC, which is televising the game, actually thinks all these things will help, not hurt, its telecast. "Because the teams are unfamiliar, there may be more interest to learn who they are," says Mark Mandel, a network spokesman.

Besides, he says, it doesn't really matter who's playing. "The Super Bowl is a national holiday in this country. A lot of people have been planning to watch for months. It may not be the Broncos or Packers, but this is the Super Bowl."

Sure, we care about the Super Bowl, but the evidence suggests we care much less than before.

ABC, for example, is projecting that the game will attract a rating of 40 – meaning 40 percent of all households in America will tune in. That's still a huge number in the ever-fragmenting television universe (a typical Monday night game on ABC draws about one-third that audience), but it's pathetic in Super Bowl terms.

A 40 rating would be even lower than last year's game between the Broncos and Falcons (remember?), which attracted the second-smallest audience in three decades. Indeed, Super Bowl viewing peaked in the early- to mid-1980s, and has followed a jagged slope downward ever since. The all-time high was in 1982, when ratings for the 49ers-Bengals game came in at 49.

Where have you gone, Super Bowl?

Perhaps, suggests Leonard Steinhorn, a communications professor at American University, we are simply spectacled out.

"The Super Bowl was created to be a spectacle unlike any other, and it was," he says. "The problem today is that everyone has caught on to turning events into spectacles. The Olympics, the NBA finals, March Madness [the NCAA basketball tournament]. Everyone has figured out how to play up the elements of human drama. When everything is high drama, nothing is high drama."

The proliferation of cable channels and the Internet has given viewers plenty of good alternatives to the Super Bowl, says Rob Whittle, who runs the Williams, Whittle ad agency in Alexandria.

But it's more than that, he adds: The Super Bowl has done a pretty good job of killing the Super Bowl.

"All the hype is ridiculous," he says. "My God, stop it already. Nothing can live up to that kind of hype. It can't be done."

Few Super Bowl games have been exciting enough to warrant the name, Whittle says. And too much "clutter" – the ad industry term for an excessive number of commercials – can even kill the enjoyment of the game-within-a-game among sponsors. Says Whittle, "We're turning everything into the Microsoft-FedEx-Coca Cola bowl."

And there's nothing super about that.