This just in: Edgerrin James grew up in Tampa!

There are some things you just have to love. Puppies. Barack Obama. People helping old ladies cross the street. Bruce. John Wooden. Rudy. Rocky. Keanu Reeves. U2 from Boy through Achtung Baby. Can't really explain it any further; these things just have an innate lovability about them.

And then there are things you just have to hate. I could make another list here, but that would be unnecessary because the clear #1 choice is: meaningless Super Bowl subplots that get beaten to death during the two-weeks-that-feels-like-two-centuries period between the end of Conference Championship weekend and the start of Super Bowl weekend. Any hardcore football fan has these phrases burned into their memory: "Jerome Bettis grew up in Detroit," "Lovie Smith and Tony Dungy are both black," "Corey Dillon just loves to be a part of a winning team," "The Panthers have sucked for a long time".....I mean, it's okay to hear these like twice, once during the Super Bowl preview on the Monday immediately following the Conference Championship games and once on the Saturday right before the Super Bowl. But unfortunately, there are 10 other days in this time period, which leaves ample room for hundreds of ESPN.com columns and Outside the Lines segments and Around the Horn arguments and NFL Network documentaries and completely uninformative interviews and basically everything possible to take your focus off the game itself and put it on these irrelevant stories that mean absolutely nothing as far as the potential outcome of the Super Bowl is concerned.

This year, we've got the always-enjoyable "player and coach at odds" subplot (Anquan Boldin's bizarre feud with Arizona's offensive coordinator), as well as the charming "so-and-so player is the new Rocky" story (Kurt Warner, who's once again brought himself up from the depths of nothingness to defy all odds and succeed beyond everyone's expectations), and the "tortured franchise finally looking for their big moment" scoop (the Cardinals haven't won a championship in like 500 years). So far, no predictions on who's going to win, no analysis of the two teams, and definitely no inside information that might help die-hard gamblers (who probably account for about 98% of the NFL's fanbase). I guess some things just never change.