These are matters to be learned from this year’s Super Bowl.

If you make the dip too early in the day and take the taco chips out of the oven hours before the game, you are very fat and happy at kickoff.

However, there are no more chips or dip.

If your neighbor is cooking ribs on the grill, be sure to go out on your porch and holler, “Hey, how ya doing?” Continue that conversation, even noting that he/she is cooking ribs if necessary, until the conversation results in an invitation derived from guilt.

Don’t worry, guilt or not, the ribs taste great.

If there is a movie on some other channel while the game is on, one you might like to see, just set the “last” button to the movie when the game starts.

This year “The Graduate” was on and it had been a while since viewing this really classic flick. It did run during the game.

Every time a commercial came on or the quarter ended and when halftime began, one needed only to click the “last” button and you could catch just about the whole movie.

Amazing how little action time there is in a football game, especially one devoted to commercials and promotions for network shows.

That may be sacrilegious to all those who want to promote all those new ads or the overblown halftime shows, but all those ads are going to run endlessly after the Super Bowl is over anyway and the halftime entertainment is on MTV somewhere every day.

Thankfully, we learned from the game that the games still matter. No matter how hard the suits of networks and teams want to believe they can provide silly robots and numbing studio analysis, it’s still about the game.

A catch with your head beats the 9,000th explanation of why the Patriots will win any day.

The final drive in a tight game is as good as it gets, and despite the flow of the game having been constantly interrupted by commercials for hours, the players find a way to make the game live.

We learned that not watching a five-hour pregame show allows one to read a book, clean the porch, erase emails, go grocery shopping, take a walk and not have missed one thing.

We all learned that one second on the clock means the game is not over. Well, almost everyone learned that.

We learned that if your brother is the quarterback for one of the teams and you are a quarterback, too, and want to hide in the corner of a luxury box to watch the game, you have about as much of a chance of avoiding the cameras as Tom Brady has of having a secret date.

We learned that all the experts who said the Pats by 12 all had a reason as to why that did not happen. There actually was only one reason – the Giants.

We learned that “perfect” is a term not to be taken lightly in sports or anywhere else.

Good lessons were these, and if you’ll excuse me, I have to make some more chips.

bdnsports@bangordailynews.net