Nobody has ever once asked me why I know that Aaron Ross ran a 4.44 at the 2007 combine.

I want to be clear about how unusual that is. If I told you the departure times of every eastbound train out of Providence, you would be having a different reaction right now, and we would both know what the reaction was about. But a forty time from 2007 gets a nod. Sometimes it gets a follow-up question. Once, at a bar, it got me a beer.

This is the only room in the culture where the thing I do is the thing you are supposed to do.

Consider what football asks of a fan. Memorize a depth chart. Track a snap count. Understand that a completion percentage means less than a completion percentage over expected, and that both mean less than what happened on third and six. Hold twenty-two men in your head at once and know which of them is the reason. Do this for thirty-two teams. Do it again in March, when nobody is playing, because the draft is a spreadsheet with a stage.

Then go on a podcast and say all of it out loud, at speed, to strangers.

Nobody calls this a special interest. They call it being a sicko, and they mean it warmly, and there are t-shirts.

I have thought about why the permission holds here and almost nowhere else. My best answer is that football is the rare object that never changes the rules on you mid-conversation. The game has a clock and a field and a book. When I am wrong about it, I am wrong in a way I can look up. Nobody has ever told me I got the tone of a fourth-down conversion wrong.

I don't want to oversell that. It is not a substitute for anything, and I know the joke about the man who can name every starting free safety since 1998 and cannot name what is going on with his brother. I have been that man. I would like to say in his defense that he is not failing to care. He is doing the same thing he does with the safeties — building the whole picture, every angle, before he says a word — and the picture with his brother in it does not resolve, and so he does not say the word.

The stats resolve. That's all. That's the entire appeal, and I think anyone who's honest about their fantasy league knows it.

The band took its name from the sport and then made a record about being nineteen and unable to say a single true thing to a person standing right in front of you, in 5/4, from a house in Illinois. Everyone plays their part perfectly. Nobody gets it said.

• • •

I have listened to it approximately four hundred times. I could tell you the tracklist. I could not tell you what to do about it.