Did you watch the Super Bowl? I never miss it.

I can’t tell you how many times my friends have expressed surprise at learning that I am a football fan. I suppose I don’t fit the stereotype that many artsy/hippie/academic folk have of people who religiously spend their fall Sundays and Monday nights in front of a television as 22 men at a time battle up and down the gridiron. But what can I tell ya? I love the game.

My friend Assyria decidedly does not. She doesn’t even own a TV, let alone has she ever directed her computer to NFL.com to check on who’s leading the league in rushing. Yet every Super Bowl Sunday she goes to a party or a bar and watches the game for exactly the same reason watched the Lost series finale (even though I’d seen less than two episodes of that stupid show) or William & Kate’s nuptials (I don’t give a damn about the royals): we are suckers for the broadbased communal experience. And even though today’s world is more able than ever to facilitate such phenomena, they seem to come less frequently all the time.

When I was a kid, when VCR technology was novel and cable TV in its infancy, for all its obvious evils, television benefitted society by bringing us into the same electronic spacetime moment. On February 28, 1983, somewhere between 106 million 122 million Americans—around half the population of the entire country—had a communal experience: the last episode of M*A*S*H. And that kind of communality helped us feel we were all part of one big something.

In the 21st century, with the increased freedom bequeathed to us by the Internet and DVRs, it’s much harder to get us all on the same page. A major tragedy will always do the trick (you couldn’t not be in front of a TV in the aftermath of 9/11); otherwise, the closest thing many of us have to a super-local communal experience are so-called “Internet memes,” which tend to be beyond trivial and evaporate into the vacuum of non-history. In day-to-day life you can even get a group of passengers to enjoy the same bus ride, what with everyone sonically ensconced in headphones or concentrating all his/her energy into a tiny handheld screen.

The Super Bowl is perhaps the last, best opportunity we have to share a positive, real-time experience with our fellow global citizens. It wasn’t until 2010 that any broadcast surpassed the viewership of the M*A*S*H finale—never mind that M*A*S*H was staggered for different time zones, while the Super Bowl goes out live across the globe.

Whether our technology has brought us increasingly closeness to or isolation from our fellow global inhabitants may be a matter of how view the question. But consideration of the question helps frame the importance of the communal experience for anyone who values shared experiences for humankind.

It’s a big world, of course. In “Ask,” Morrissey sings, “If it’s not love, then it’s the bomb that will bring us together.” But for all The Smiths’ tuneful, poetic nicety, realistically it’s only an extinction-level event (like a big meteor slamming into our little world) that can put all of humanity on the same page. Until then, we must take our uniting experiences where we can find them. And while the broadest inclusive experiences have their particular merit (especially when they’re not the tragic sort), narrower ones do the same for our smaller realms, from cities down to neighborhoods and social circles. That’s why I actually enjoy the Grand Prix, despite finding auto racing a real head-scratcher. That’s why I like Fourth of July and New Year’s Eve fireworks for more than the pretty lights and big booms. That’s why I wish there were more events like Summer And Music or Bixby Knolls First Fridays—and even the various smallish arts happenings individuals put on from time to time—and encourage everyone I can to come out and join in the experience. I like it when it feels like we’re all in this together.

It didn’t really matter to me that the Ravens held off the 49ers to claim the Vince Lombardi Trophy; I enjoyed not just the culmination of another season of the only sport I really follow, but the feeling that I was sharing in something with so many of you. It’s not quite love, but if football can bring so many of us into the same moment, connecting Long Beach with Long Island and California with Calais, the United States with the United Arab Emirates, then rah-rah-rah.

And may we have as many microcosmic shared experiences as we can cram into our collective social calendar. Lucky for us that we can create them. All we have to do is come together.