If you want to really understand how unimportant the actual 60-minute game on Super Bowl Sunday is to the powers-at-be of the NFL, you must attend a Super Bowl in person.

Technically speaking, Super Bowl Week begins around the Sunday night before the game, when the teams fly in, wave the plane doors and walk their bags on the tarmac.

A few days before the suckers … I mean the fans with four-figure spending limits — come to town, we have the mainstream media begin the charade called “Media Day,” which is more about people wearing bizarre costumes and asking players and coaches questions about their underwear of choice.

Super Bowl Week, which really starts hopping around Thursday, is mostly about parties, sponsors, diva half-time performers and, well, adding a billion dollars to the NFL coffers.

There are a bevy of fake, happy, beautiful people, most with company brand names adorned on their golf shirts, pilfering the public at every street corner of the host city.

You wonder how they can charge $250 for a cheap Super Bowl pullover at some NFL store, and then by Saturday morning they are sold out? It’s like an addiction, this NFL thing, akin to a sucker is born every minute.

By Sunday at noon on game day, Super Bowl Week is over. The NFL trucks are loaded and headed to some storage facility, maybe in Montana. Most of the hucksters with those golf shirts are smarter than smart, and they were out of town on some plane and home by the kickoff at some Super Bowl party.

The game? LOL.

Did you see the game-changing play, a semi-holding penalty? Or better yet and even worse, did you see the players slipping and sliding all over the field?Was it raining in the desert that day? Nope, 75 degrees and not a cloud in the sky. Players slipping and sliding, having to change their cleats, was collateral damage to the event, not the game, called the Super Bowl.

It was embarrassment that the sport’s pinnacle event had more concern with the  half-time show than it did for the actual game, which was supposed to decide the world’s greatest football team for the 2022 season.

I’m not going to say the NBA, NHL and MLB are bastions of fair play over business, but the NFL’s utter disregard for the actual game is disheartening.

While the prevailing wisdom is acquiring the non-fan on this day reaps big rewards, including $7 million per 30-second ad, I beg to differ.

Remember, the NFL commissioner Roger “Hugs” Goodell, hauls in $65 million … per year.

I’m not saying the other stuff doesn’t matter. I’m saying the 60-minute game should matter more.

But as we saw on Sunday, it’s trending the other way. Free money is bigger than the game.

You can email Bill Burt at bburt@eagletribune.com.