How's everybody's Super Bowl recovery going? Are you still in tears? Still grinding your teeth at night? Did you fall to the floor and start thrashing about even just reading the words "Super Bowl" in my headline? Then you're doing about as well as I am.

Here's a fun story: On Saturday night, I was at a bar where an NFL highlight show came on, at which point I flagged down the bartender and asked for anything else.

She, heroically, put on The Sandlot. That qualifies as my football highlight of the week.

So, I bet you want other Seattle sports to block out whatever happened two Sundays ago that we're not going to talk about anymore. Well, bad news, everybody! There is nothing going on that's big enough to block all that out.

On the college front, the University of Washington men’s basketball season is going down in flames after a hot start, following star center Robert Upshaw dismissal from the team for legally smoking pot. As always, the NCAA is the worst and I regret mentioning anything associated with that hellscape of an organization.

“Oh, but pitchers and catchers are reporting which means that baseball is coming and the Mariners are good this year,” I hear you yelling into the screen. And yes, some people do get excited about pitchers and catchers reporting. And no, you should not be one of those people.

Wildly, the third part of the above sentiment is true. Preseason stats projections (including PECOTA, the baseballing brainchild of Nate Silver) peg the Mariners as a serious AL pennant contender, something that I promise we will get into in stultifying length in the coming weeks. Also, the first part of that sentence is true: pitchers and catchers will be reporting to Mariners spring training down in Peoria, Arizona, in the near future. That’s their job. To show up where the team plays. However, the arrival of pitchers and catchers means worthwhile baseball is still forever away from happening.

Pitchers and catchers report weeks before spring training games begin. And spring training games are themselves very, very boring. At best, they’re methadone for baseball addicts. They look like baseball, they smell like baseball, but they aren’t baseball, and should not be consumed by anyone but the strange and baseball obsessed (read: me, maybe you, and probably George Will). To line up for metaphorical sports methadone like it’s a new iPad in fucking Arizona? That’s a sad, awful place to be.

To make things worse, by paying attention to baseball before position players arrive at spring training, you can only hear bad news. Pitchers are the most fragile athletes out there; the only real news that could be reported is “Pitcher X missed a throwing session because his forearm was tight.” This is news that is likely to be meaningless as it is to mean that Pitcher X will never play professional baseball again. That’s an awful range of uncertainty to deal with six weeks prior to any real baseball action. If you need spring training news, wait for everyone to show up so you can hear, “Willie Bloomquist is in the best shape of his life” rather than “Pitcher X has shoulder soreness.”

(Also, the reason I keep saying Pitcher X is because I don’t have the heart to jinx any real life pitcher. Seriously, rooting for pitchers is a grueling nightmare, and I won’t even list the obvious exception on the Mariners current roster lest I jinx him. But you know which king I’m talking about. He’s great. Worth rooting for. But um, I’m not going say his name.)

But you still need Seattle sports to get excited about… well… how about preseason soccer?

Certainly no bad news with the Sounders… Clint Dempsey is scoring goals for the US, Brad Evans is patrolling as the team’s new option at center back, and team leader and talismanic midfielder Osvaldo Alonso just had groin surgery… oh, for fuck’s sake…

Well, that bit of badness aside (and in good news, Ozzie will likely be back right around opening day), Sounders soccer is starting to happen. The team lost 2-1 in a preseason match against the LA Galaxy that was not televised and featured a “guest player” starting for the Sounders at fullback.

This is where the Sounders' place in world of sports gets confusing. In some ways the Seattle Sounders are a massive professional sports organization. They draw huge attendance numbers, employ a few world class soccer players, and win big trophies. In other ways, the Seattle Sounders are a backwater minor-league team for a vast landscape of massive European soccer teams that will poach anything that looks like talent away from us.

To be clear, both of those ways to look at the team are true and valid; people who argue there is only one way to see MLS are lunatics (they’re out there and they’re blogging hard) and should not be engaged with. Also, none of this diminishes what the Sounders have accomplished over the past five years from a footballing or marketing perspective. In five years, they’ve turned an expansion franchise into a really good soccer team that plays in front of massive crowds and produces world-class talent in a country that is struggling to produce any top soccer talent. By way of comparison, it took the Mariners thirteen years to figure out that kids would like a moose to high five at the games.

And so here we are, without homegrown star DeAndre Yedlin (now the property of north London outfit Tottenham Hotspur), and in his place is a player who for contractual reasons can literally not be named. It’s weird. But also, the infrastructure around MLS is not like the NFL or Major League Baseball. There is excellent reporting going on locally, but there are still limitations as to what we’ll know about the team in the run up to the season, which officially kicks off on March 8.

So everything sucks right now. It’s February in Seattle, the TVs in bars still want to show Pete Carroll being sad no matter how sad that makes me, and we’re a month away from soccer and two months away from baseball. But that's the whole point. It's February in Seattle. If it didn’t suck here in February, it wouldn't be Seattle. It would be Arizona, which sucks all the time. So hang tight, things will get better. And in the meantime, can I recommend The Sandlot? It's Denis Leary's best work by a mile.