A few things have changed since I was last directly involved in Super Bowl coverage for Newsday 20 years ago. There was no pandemic then, of course. At the time, Tom Brady was nothing more than a low-round draft choice who had just finished his rookie season, during which he appeared in one game, tried three passes and completed one. He was David; he would become Goliath later.

At the 2001 Super Bowl, in fact, the perceived impact of the opposing quarterbacks was the very antithesis to this year’s ballyhooed star-power Brady-Patrick Mahomes expectation: Which of them, Baltimore’s Trent Dilfer or the New York Giants’ Kerry Collins, would avoid fouling up the situation? (Collins threw four interceptions, so Dilfer was the default winner.)

For that game, the Giants’ second-string quarterback, not afforded the opportunity to bail out Collins, was Jason Garrett, who these days is the team’s offensive coordinator and, in some minds, has underdelivered in that role. Garrett’s current job belonged in 2001 to Sean Payton, now head coach of the New Orleans Saints, who were just denied a spot in this Super Bowl by Brady and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

The world turns. Things evolve, things disappear altogether. The venues for four of my first five Super Bowl adventures have been demolished—Houston’s Rice University Stadium (1974), New Orleans’ Tulane Stadium (1975), Miami’s Orange Bowl (1976 and ’79).

But this year’s championship game returns, for a third time, to Tampa’s Raymond James Stadium, which first hosted the event in 2001, when I witnessed Baltimore’s 34-7 walloping of the Giants. That big pirate ship—made of concrete, eminently sinkable—remains behind one Raymond James Stadium end zone.

Tampa, furthermore, is still a town where you can get a really good victory cigar—and therefore seems an ideal place for the Big Game. Tampa’s historic Latin quarter, Ybor City, endures as a Cigar Capital, and it was there that I found “master roller” Roberto Ramirez, considered No. 1 in his craft in his native Cuba before he defected in 1996. He was cigar maker to U.S. celebrities and politicians, had been invited to the White House, and was still at his job in his mid-70s, according to the most updated internet information I could find on him from 10 years ago.

The other Super Bowl constant, as true now as when I was immersed in the hullabaloo for the first of seven times in January 1974, is the event’s status as the Great American Conversation Piece. The Great American Timeout (maybe even more so now, in the midst of the plague and political division). The Great American Spectacle.

The Super Bowl’s exalted position in our national culture can be explained, at least partially, by the phenomenon that hot air rises. This Great American Sideshow is inflated, like the blimp overhead. Its scale is exaggerated; the Great American Fish Story. It is undeniably hard-wired into the circuitry of our American lifestyle. Citizens avoid planning weddings and other major happenings on Super Bowl dates.

And the NFL’s manifest destiny marches on. Super Bowl sites already are set for 2022 (at the Rams/Chargers new home in Inglewood, Calif.), 2023 (Glendale, Ariz.), 2025 (New Orleans.) The only reason the 2024 location isn’t set is because the league’s upcoming regular-season expansion to 17 games would set up a conflict with that year’s Mardi Gras festivities in New Orleans, which had been the designated host. Speculation is that the 2024 game will end up in Las Vegas, emblematic of Great American Overindulgence.

The Super Bowl’s place, as something akin to a national religion, is such that in 1990 a Columbia, S.C., Presbyterian pastor named Brad Smith conceived the “Souper Bowl of Caring,” asking churches to organize the collection of $1 contributions after services on Super Bowl Sunday for soup kitchens and charities.

At the 2001 Tampa Super Bowl, Smith was permitted by the NFL to stage a press conference for his project—“Enjoy the game but think of the less fortunate,” was his pitch. Only a single reporter and two TV cameras showed up, while thousands or other journalists were busy reporting on Baltimore star linebacker Ray Lewis’ year-old murder case and Tampa’s reputation for strip clubs. Smith was not deterred. “Why not use the power of sports?” he said then. “Nothing transcends divisions in our culture like the Super Bowl game.”

So the annual frivolity is upon us again. This time, many of the spectators in Tampa will be of the cardboard variety. This time, Covid-19, the monster under our beds, is lurking, and among the consequences is exacerbating food insecurity across the country. But Smith’s organization, tapping into the power of the Super Bowl, now reports having raised $163 million. Which sounds worthy of a good victory cigar.