Mike Celizic

Packers-Cowboys isn’t as big as Patriots-Colts, but only in the sense that the PGA Championship isn’t the Masters. In other words, it’s still a highlight of the season, one of the few games that you’d do just about anything to see.

If your spouse wants to go shopping, you hand her your Visa Plutonium card and tell her to have fun without you. If your kid has a recital at school, you ask if somebody can possibly videotape it so you can watch it later. If you work that night, you call in sick.

It’s the kind of game that will be sure to drive office conversation for weeks after, a game that will determine which of two old and honored franchises has the edge on getting to the Super Bowl, a game that pits the hottest young quarterback in the game against a grizzled legend.

It’s a game that would set a record for Thursday night football viewership — if only we were allowed to watch it.

And there’s the catch — a fly the size of Moby Dick in an eight-ounce jar of ointment. The NFL in its infinite greed decided that the game is too big for anything as common as network television — or even any of the 37 ESPN channels. Instead, it’s reserved this game for the sole enjoyment of those lucky enough to have a television service provider that offers the NFL Network.

This is about money and nothing else. The NFL brags that it’s the only professional sports league that has always given away all of its games — there are no regional sports networks owned by teams that you have to be to see every game. And now it just wants to have a few games to sell on its own network, because, as we all know, the game doesn’t get enough money out of us as it is.

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Paying for tickets and parking and game jerseys and throwback jerseys and all the licensed products we simply must have isn’t enough. Digging into our pockets to pay for their new stadiums isn’t enough. Paying $20 for two drinks and a hot dog isn’t enough, either. Now we’ve got to pay to watch the games on television.

Of course, the NFL doesn’t want us to pay to see Packers-Cowboys and, on the last Saturday of the season, Giants-Patriots. It wants the cable companies to pay for the service and then pass the costs on to us whichever way they wish. That way it’s not our fault if we don’t get the games. It’s the cable companies.

Football fans have their jocks in a knot over this. It’s not as if those of us without the necessary cable hook-up have a choice in this. Where I live, I have two choices, keeping the all-in-one telephone/TV/high-speed Internet service I have or ditching it all and paying for a satellite service that offers NFLN and then phone service from someone else and Internet service from yet another provider.

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And that’s what the NFL wants them to do. The league has even set up a Web site, iwantnflnetwork.com, where it urges outraged NFL fans to blame their cable companies for not allowing them to see the game.

It’s a shameless ploy meant to deflect your wrath from its rightful target — the NFL itself. The league wants you to believe that cable companies are somehow cosmically obliged to carry their channel as part of its basic service, because if they don’t, every atom in the universe will explode at three times the speed of light, and we’ll never find out who won Dancing with the Stars.

Believe me, I’m willing to blame the cable companies for every evil on the planet, including golfers who take 15 minutes to line up their fourth putt. For most of my adult life, they’ve had me by my delicate bits and the more cash I throw at them, the tighter their grip gets.

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But this one isn’t their fault. The NFL wants them to pay for NFLN and give it away free. And they’re under no obligation to do that.

So we have the cable industry with their great gobs of money lined up against the NFL with its great gobs, and they’re staring each other down to see who blinks first. Neither one of them gives a flying fiddlehead about the fans who just want to see the game. They both know we’ll still be there when they get done staring each other down and come to an agreement about how best to shake more money out of the public.

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And nothing achieves that mutual goal better than having a game like Packers-Cowboys on a network that millions of fans can’t get. The resulting uproar — I’m still waiting for the Congressional hearings on this one — forces the issue and makes the paying public all that much more eager to get the channel — regardless of the cost. It’s the fox and the grapes all over again — we want all the more that which we can’t have.

It’s shameless, bordering on extortion. And it’s all the NFL’s fault.

And we’d forgive the greedy so-and-so’s tomorrow if only they’d give us the darned game.

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