Let's pretend Sunday is already here.
You're watching the big game on the requisite giant flat-screen TV. You're sitting in the requisite Starship Enterprise recliner with dual cup-holders. You're gorging on enough food to nauseate even the contestants on The Biggest Loser.
Suddenly you hear those magical words: "Up next, the Super Bowl halftime show."
OK, how do you react?
If you're a baby boomer, you're thinking: "Great, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band!"
If you're a Gen-Xer or Gen-Nexter or whatever the young call themselves these days, you roll your eyes, mutter, "Great, another geeze-fest" and go off to Twitter your friends about how lame the show is.
This, friends, is the vast cultural divide that confronts us with these halftime shows.
Look, I bow to no one in my veneration of the great Springsteen and his band, whom I have seen in concert many times and consider the best show on the planet. But would it kill the NFL to book a Super Bowl halftime act that wasn't around when Nixon was impeached?
Would it be so awful to see performers who don't have hip replacements, bladder issues and back-orders of Viagra on their credit cards? Performers who (here's a radical concept) young people might like, too?
Instead, the league keeps trotting out these dinosaurs of rock, making the halftime show feel like some sanitized Woodstock for AARP members.
Let's take a look at the halftime performers at the last five Super Bowls, shall we? They are: Springsteen, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Prince, the Rolling Stones and Sir Paul McCartney.
Some of these acts are so old, they should be embalmed. The Stones have an average age of, what, 117? Sir Paul is 97. Bruce is 88. Tom Petty and Prince, well into their 70s, have been seen lining up for the early-bird special at South Florida restaurants for years now.
OK, maybe none of those artists are really that old.
But you get my point here. The NFL is not exactly showing off exciting new talent at these halftime shows, which drives young people from the room like someone sprayed tear gas.
Most of the problem, of course, stems from what happened at the halftime show five years ago during Super Bowl 38. (Sorry, we're not using those pretentious Roman numerals here. It's a football game, not the reign of a French monarch.)
You remember that night of quality entertainment, of course.
