I’m not sure how many Super Bowls I covered. I could search it out, but let’s just say it probably was 12, over a three-decade period.

From the time I was trusted to cover a major event, which commenced around 1980, I did any Super Bowl that was within driving distance from the office (250 miles or less) … with a few others mixed in while on duty for Gannett News Service.

So, I saw four SBs at the Rose Bowl, three in San Diego, two in Arizona … and then random games in Miami and New Orleans and the I-10 roadtrip Super Bowl game in Jacksonville, in 2005. The best game to cover? New York Giants 17, New England Patriots 14, in 2008. I hate the Patriots, and The Helmet Catch kept them from becoming the only team to have a 19-0 season. Ha. Ha-ha-ha.

But I digress.

What I am thinking about, on this Monday of Super Bowl week, is that this is a particularly silly, over-long process, but pretty much everyone who can get there feels obliged to do so … even when the expense of housing and flights almost certainly will be out-weighed by the banality of what happens right up till kickoff — and sometimes right through to 00:00 on the clock.

The Super Bowl is … or certainly was, during my career, the best worst event to cover in sports journalism. Marvelous in concept; too often dreary in reality.

Let me reconstruct the shtick, which I believe remains pretty much unchanged since my last SB — in 2008.

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I graduated from Long Beach State.

There. I said it.

Not everyone is keen to let the world know they attended Long Beach State.

It is a real school, for sure, with more than 31,000 undergrads. But it is not known for academic excellence. It is ranked 26th among “regional universities West” by U.S. News. Just ahead of Cal Poly Pomona.

Generally, Long Beach State is not known for excellence, at all.

How does the saying go? “A Trojan for life, a Bruin for four years, a 49er until you finally get that diploma — or find a decent-paying job, first.”

Which is how it worked for me; I had a newspaper job before I had a Long Beach State diploma; that came some months later. Some of the most famous Long Beach State “alumni” didn’t actually graduate. Nearly all the athletes. The comedian Steve Martin; the singers Karen and Richard Carpenter. Lots of show-biz people. Steven Spielberg started at Long Beach State in 1965 and finished there in 2002. (He did a few things in between.) So he actually got a diploma. Go, Home Boy! The director Chris Carter. (Another guy who walked!)

So, this is a long way around to getting to some events that tempered a sort of built-in LBSU inferiority complex:

Long Beach State’s men’s volleyball team. Defending NCAA champions after defeating UCLA in five sets last year. Currently ranked No. 1 in the country, including a four-set (25-16, 26-24, 19-25, 25-17) victory tonight over USC.

And what you have done against those two heavyweights is important, among the ranks of southern California schools.

We took advantage of an attractive home match to be there on the night Long Beach State raise the 2018 championship banner to the ceiling of the Walter Pyramid, the home arena.

How big a deal is that?

Long Beach State has won only two NCAA titles in men’s team sports: The volleyball title last year, and the one in 1991.

So celebrating was a certainty, at LBSU.

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The Los Angeles Rams are one victory from playing in the Super Bowl.

If they defeat the New Orleans Saints tomorrow … they go to American football’s biggest game.

However, I do not believe we will see that happen. Not this year. Because of one match-up where the Saints have a distinct advantage.

At quarterback, where Jared Goff of the Rams is pitted against Drew Brees of the Saints.

Or, to put it another way, a pretty good third-year quarterback … against one of the elite quarterbacks in the history of the game.

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While in Southern California for these months now, we have been fortunate enough, on several nights, to be staying in a household that watches the game show Jeopardy!, as we do.

We recently saw most of the five-day run of the semi-notorious Jackie Fuchs, former bass player for the Runaways, a 1970s girl group, which was televised a few weeks ago. She then wrote about it for L.A. Magazine.

Her reflections on her appearances on the popular game show prompted me to recall my own, which aired in 1988 — or more than 30 years (!) ago.

This blog post from 2015 takes us through my Jeopardy! appearance, during which I came within a fraction of a second from winning the game.

But seeing Fuchs’s story makes me think about one even bigger void in my Jeopardy! experience.

I do not have videotape of the episode on which I appeared, and I would love to see it.

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Just read a piece in the Wall Street Journal by a reporter noting today is the 50th anniversary of the New York Jets’ 16-7 upset of the Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl 3.

Most football fans who were over the age of 10 or 12, on January 12, 1969, remember the event.

I fall into that demographic and the idea that the game was half a century ago prompts head-shaking (where did the years go?) as well as some flashes of recollection on the game itself (Joe Namath celebrating), as well as its build-up (Namath’s apparent “guarantee” of Jets victory, days before the game, despite being 18-point underdogs.

Key factors in the ongoing notoriety of that game?

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The championship tournament of Asian soccer is under way at the moment in the United Arab Emirates, and I sorta/kinda wish I were there.

Asian teams are becoming more interesting, and perhaps a bit more competitive, in recent years, and to have a look at the top 24 of them, all playing this month in one small country … well, that could be fun.

But the decision came down to a long stretch of time in Southern California versus most of a month in the UAE … and family and friends won out, easily.

One thing about soccer, is how players and coaches and clubs and national teams repeatedly cross paths.

The Asian Cup (as the continental tournament is known) is a perfect opportunity to consider, anew, the upheaval inherent in soccer, and particularly at the “manager” level.

It is the ultimate forum in sports where no one should ever say “goodbye” but, rather, “until we meet again.”

I thought about this when I saw that Iraq, one of the 24 teams in the Asian Cup, is coached by one Srecko Katanec, with whom I spent a few fraught days in Beirut in September of 2011.

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The Alabama-Clemson game coming up tonight marks the fourth consecutive season those schools have met in college football’s final game.

And many of us are sick and bloody tired of watching those two decide who will be national champion.

Some have suggested it is a good thing, this repetition. “Would you rather see Notre Dame or a Pac-12 team in there?” is the sort of rhetorical question posed — which usually comes with information on how many of the nation’s elite recruits have chosen those two school in recent years, and how many of them go on to play in the National Football League.

What I would like to see is simple: Schools not named Alabama or Clemson being good enough to play for a championship.

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Our Southern California sojourn has taken us to San Diego, where we found a rainy (!) day and were prompted to consider visiting an indoor venue.

Such as the Air and Space Museum in Balboa Park.

It was impressive enough that we were happy the day had turned rainy.

The highlight was peering through the window of the command capsule for Apollo 9, the space mission that focused on the Lunar Module — making sure the “LM” could separate from the command capsule, maneuver away from it and link up again. That ability was key to subsequent events leading to Apollo 11 and two men walking on the moon.

Also, having two men outside the command module, which was going to be a necessity when NASA reached the moon, was another “first” for Apollo 9,

I got a little verklempt peeking through the window into the tiny capsule where three crazy-brave astronauts had less personal space than a customer on the cheapest of cut-rate, sardine-can commercial airlines.

That anyone could climb into that capsule, as it sat atop a Saturn 5 rocket, waiting to be blasted into space … well, that is some cold-blooded courage, and Apollo 9 astronauts James McDivitt, David Scott and Rusty Schweikart had that “right stuff”.

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Those of us who grew up with the UCLA basketball of John Wooden … and serial NCAA basketball championships … well, we were ruined for life.

After 10 national titles in 12 seasons, including seven (!) consecutive through 1973, and an 88-game winning streak, unrealistic expectations became the norm.

I distinctly remember listening to UCLA’s double-overtime loss to North Carolina State in the 1974 NCAA semifinals, the Bruins’ first playoffs defeat since 1963. I was working at my father’s gas station; we had the radio tuned to the game. I was shattered.

UCLA did not disappear, when Wooden rode into the sunset after one more title. There was a championship in 1995 from a team coached by Jim Harrick and starring the O’Bannon brothers, title-game appearances in 1980 and 2006 and final-four trips in 1976, 2007 and 2008.

After a decade or four, only the aging fans from the days of Wooden approached every season as a “championship or bust” proposition. But, too, UCLA could never be ordinary. Let alone ridiculous.

Which is why the Bruins fired coach Steve Alford late last night.

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Interesting post-journalism story making the rounds.

A veteran writer for Sports Illustrated, laid off last year, is earning $17 an hour delivering packages for Amazon. And now he has written about his career change for The Atlantic.

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