Super Bowl Sunday is a meeting of titans. Twenty-two behemoths line up to engage in one of the most physically brutal spectacles still legal in the civilized world.

In the trenches, these armored warriors meet in a test of muscle versus muscle. Eyes are gouged. Arms are bitten. Fingers stomped. Bones broken.

Americans are drawn to this primitive violence like vultures to carrion. They tune in to the game by the millions, hungry for blood. Their wild, rolling eyes take in every solid block, every pounding run, every jaw-shattering hit.

This year, we tuned into the Super Bowl with the same perverse anticipation, but now it was mixed with a grim sense of foreboding. It was a volatile combination. This was not a normal Sunday -- not even a normal Super Bowl Sunday.

The teams meeting in battle on this February day in Arizona -- the New York Giants and the New England Patriots -- were playing for more than the Lombardi Trophy. The winner of this game would represent the victor in the fight between Good and Evil. And so, Americans kept their eyes glued on their televisions, nervous sweat dripping from their foreheads.

I was not exempt from the infectious madness. I had prepared for the big game in the way one might prepare for the coming apocalypse. I had beside me a case of Budweiser. The stereo speakers were howling the Allman Brothers Band because I could no longer bear to hear the talking heads on the television refer to the Patriots as the greatest team in recorded history. I clenched in my hands a can of Bud and the remote, my knuckles white. Froth dripped from the can and soaked into the carpet like rain into thirsty desert sand.

Never before had Evil gone 19-0. This was unprecedented, a cause for concern, if not panic. Pro football is America's modern-day pastime and a team, ironically named the Patriots, was threatening to usurp the sport's brutal purity.

The side of Good, meanwhile, had assembled a ragtag bunch, in the New York Giants, to defend its honor. It seemed hopeless from the start.

And so I sat, feverishly staring, every fiber of my being attempting to will New England into defeat. I tore open another Bud without taking my eyes from the screen and tossed the crumpled can to the floor and into the accumulating pile.

As the game progressed, the tension only increased. The exact details are a blur -- the play on the football field was only an afterthought compared to the greater forces at work. Beyond the odd scream here and there, the streets of State College were dead quiet.

But when the dust cleared, Good had once again prevailed. The Giants, against all odds, dethroned the prematurely crowned champions with a powerful blast of old-fashioned brute force. Americans had tuned in to see violence, and violence they got, breathing a sigh of relief as tragedy was narrowly averted. Until the next Super Bowl, at least, the balance has been returned.

Andrew Steadman is a junior majoring in journalism and is an enterprise reporter for The Daily Collegian. His e-mail is aas5066@psu.edu.