Thus in 1982, the 49ers beat the Bengals in Super Bowl XVI. Super Bowls are so momentous that they must have Roman numerals affixed. Two, this was the 16th Super Bowl, but perish the thought of referring to it in such a pedestrian fashion. Nope: while the Cincinnati team is certainly named for the Bengal tiger-their uniforms and helmets are tiger-striped-the name is pronounced “Ben-gils'. One, that word is not pronounced to rhyme with “ball', as we Indians would say it.

The 49ers still won 26-21, but it was a tense game almost all the way to the end. The 49ers ran up a big lead in the first half, only to watch the Bengals whittle away at it through the second half.

It was an unusual Super Bowl, in that it was a closely fought game with fluctuating fortunes. That was a game between the San Francisco 49ers, led by their charismatic quarterback who was already a superstar, Joe Montana, and the Cincinnati Bengals. But I think I started understanding the hold football has on the American psyche only when I watched my first Super Bowl, in January 1982. I first learned about the game while watching my university team battle on their home field, not far from my basement apartment. Their “football' is a strange affair which doesn’t involve the feet much, except for running and the occasional, situation-specific kick. Only, I quickly found that in the US, they call that game “soccer', and anyway not too many Americans play it (though that has changed in recent years, as huge numbers of American kids have taken to soccer).

You know, that exercise in kicking a round ball up and down a field? With a name like that, I thought, it must at best be a variation of the game I grew up with here in India. Like other Indian travellers of my vintage-I don’t know if things are different now-when I first got to the US, I knew zilch about their football. I wrote in this space a few weeks ago about my earliest exposure to American football. So it turned out this year, as the Denver Broncos routed the Carolina Panthers 24-10. Following that home truth, the game itself is often a one-sided disappointment one of the two teams seems unable to come to grips with the occasion and gets crushed.

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