NFL WEEK 9: Our official predictions for who wins this weekend

David J. Phillip/AP

I can’t stop thinking about that game.

This is a football column, yes, and one that nominally has to do with making picks against the spread, either for (legal!) monetary reasons or just for sheer fun … and we’ll get to that.

But first, Game 7.

If you spend even a little bit of time each week consuming sports, maybe you’ve experienced that moment where you wonder why, really, you have chosen to spend your time caring about the result of a game in which a ball is hit with a bat, or thrown through a ring, or kicked into a net. The result is ultimately meaningless, more often than not your team disappoints you, and there are countless other ways you might more productively or more intelligently or at the very least more healthily spend your time.

Maybe you’ve especially felt that way during the election — as I admittedly have. The election, for better and for worse, has given us both the entertainment that sports provides and that feeling of greater importance, of stakes, that sports necessarily lacks. It’s hard, I think, to really care about the Thursday night, or Sunday night, or Monday night football games right now.

And then something like Game 7 happens, something so thrillingly incomprehensible and so damn fun, and all of a sudden you remember why it is you have chosen to spend your free time glued to the TV late into the night.

Here’s Roger Angell, the legendary New Yorker sportswriter, on this feeling exactly but in slightly more eloquent words:

“It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitive as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look — I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring — caring deeply and passionately, really caring — which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives.

And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naivete — the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing and shouting with joy in the middle of the night over the hap hazardous flight of a distant ball — seems a small price to pay for such a gift.”

Angell wrote that about the 1975 World Series. It couldn’t possibly feel more relevant today.

Anyway, I went 6-6 last week in my picks against the spread. Below are my picks for Week 9.

LAST WEEK: 6-6

SEASON: 60-58-3