Being a Patriots fan this season has been like waking up and suddenly discovering your dick is six inches bigger. You went to bed and everything was normal. "Yup, this is my junk," you think. "Good ol' cock-and-balls." You never thought anything of it before, really. And then, overnight: You've got a goddamn soup can in your underpants.

The initial reaction is utter disbelief. "This can't actually be happening, can it?" you think, then giggle, half-embarrassed, half-excited, unsure of what to do next. But the wins pile up, and when the weather gets cold, that dick never shrinks. Not even a little bit. And it dawns on you: I might have the largest cock in the history of professional football. And everyone knows it.

Eventually, you accept this fact, fully aware that your team is undefeated and you're sporting the kind of wood that could single-handedly boost International Paper's profit margins. And when you do, there are two possible reactions: You either get quiet and develop the smug grin of a man who looks forward to using the open trough urinal at the ballpark. Or you swear off pants completely and compulsively rub yourself all day, like an eight-year-old after drinking a 164-ounce Coke.

Me? I kinda got shy and acted like I had a regular dick, fearing that overconfidence would jinx the team. As the rest of the country is painfully aware, most people didn't go down this path. And now, I'm ashamed to admit, the Patriots fanbase is filled with more raging dickheads than Jasmine St. Clair in The World's Largest Gang Bang II.

I totally understand why you hate the New England Patriots.

What can I say? Our coach is an evil tyrant who cheats during games and laughed during Schindler's List. Our quarterback is a pretty-boy asshole who knocked up his last girlfriend and collects homosexual kiddie porn. Our best wide-receiver likes to punch women in the face and was the primary cause of the mortgage lending scandal. Whether real or imagined, I've heard all the complaints before, just about every day since last year. (Here on Deadspin, I even compared the team to the loathed and misunderstood Communist China — and this was before the cheating scandal.)

People hate the Patriots because they're boring, win all the time and say the same dull shit after every game. ("It's a one-game season." "We have to play a perfect game to win." "Our injury report is out on Wednesday.") They hate the Patriots because, as the dominant team, indifference is not an option. (Just imagine someone saying "The Patriots are OK. I guess.") But mostly sports fans hate the Patriots because they're sick and tired of hearing about their "quest for perfection" every six seconds.

Hell, I'm sick of hearing about the New England Patriots, too. Especially now, during the build-up to Super Bowl, a two-week-long shit show where pointlessness like Tom Brady's walking boot gets round-the-clock coverage, complete with lazy sportswriter moniker (namely, "BootGate," which follows in the proud tradition of "RunUpTheScoreGate" and "SpyGate"). Luckily, we've got less than a week of this dog-and-pony show left. I'm sure we'll see even more incredibly detailed player-by-player breakdowns of both teams (one reason why I'm not even going to discuss about who will win this game), breathless write-ups of computer simulations of the Super Bowl (pure pointlessness wrapped in conjecture) and more of Mercury Morris trying to "rap."

(An aside: The major reason I want a 19-0 season, outside of the obvious, is my hope that Morris will have a massive coronary after realizing he'll never appear on TV again. That is, unless American Idol begins allowing elderly contestants.)

Here's all I care about — the Patriots will play the Giants on Sunday. I don't want to hear anything unless it's the sound of a foot kicking a ball to open the game. There's nothing for me to say here, nothing that someone else hasn't already said, or will say, or that you would want to read anyway. Hell, I don't even want to read my own crappy column.

Let's just play the game already. Then we'll see whose dick is bigger.

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A couple weeks back, in my preview of the New England Patriots' upcoming season, I jokingly compared them to the People's Republic of China, another mysterious nation with incredible resources and potential entering this football season. After this most recent spying scandal and the backlash from players across the league, those parallels are even clearer now.

As with football, every single first world country spies on each other — it's part of the proverbial game, right? (Heck, America even spies on our own allies!) (Ed. Note: And its own citizens.) But China, like New England, really gets under America's skin when it does it. People forget, but just seven years ago, before 9/11, America was obsessed with the fact that China was stealing our nuclear secrets. There was the Cox Report in 1999, then news that China was retrofitting passenger airliners into spy planes, and finally, poor Wen Ho Lee, who was falsely accused of spying on America. Last year, China even pulled a Mangina and retaliated against America's attempts to spy — firing laser beams at U.S. spy satellites, effectively blinding them.