Proofing emergency in the bakery aisle.

No, unfortunately, it’s not a typo. A month ago I scheduled that dreaded procedure — a colonoscopy — without looking at the scoreboard, oops, I mean the calendar. Not that I’m a die-hard football fan, not even close; but I do occasionally wander over to the home of dyed-in-the-wool-every-kind-of-sports fanatic Vicki Vanneman while a game is on the telly.

Vick is a sports genius as far as I can tell. She can interpret all the arcane twitches and inscrutable hand gestures of the umps; knows immediately when a yellow flag is tossed why it’s been tossed; explains strategy; offers opinions; swears at appropriate times; even wears the proper fan-gear when available. Baseball, basketball, soccer, football, rowing, lacrosse — she probably even understands hurling and curling — you name it, she’s up on it. (I know synchronized swimming — there are no umps.)

She wandered to our left coast after meeting my sis at then West Chester State College in West Chester, PA (now West Chester University, www.wcupa.edu) decades ago. WCU raises and trains sports jocks and sport-jock teachers. They learn all about balls, birdies, bats, boards, boots, blades, and etc.

I really shouldn’t be poking fun at them because long years ago I was considered a jock, in the olden days when it was thought to be impossible, or at least untoward, for young women to run around on both ends of the basketball court unsupervised. Some guy, I’m sure it was a guy, came up with the notion, “Let’s not let the little ladies run too far or too fast.” So for women only a center line like the Berlin Wall was created on the court. The offense team stood with their hands in their pockets on one side of the wall while action commenced at the defense end, and vice-versa.

There was only one female player who could cross the center line and play on both ends of the court — the “rover” — and I was that rover on our high school basketball team. My job was basically to get the ball back into play. (It’s only now I realize how ridiculous that logic was: if one woman could do it, why not all of them?) Back then we didn’t ask any silly pre-feminist questions, we just wanted to play.

Anyway, back to the Super Bowel.

Most lucky humans eat three meals a day. And on Super Bowl Sunday there are several extra “mealettes” thrown in consisting of — let’s see — pizza, nachos fries, Tex-Mex chicken wings, Buffalo Pickle chips, bacon-wrapped tater tots, soft pretzels, pigs-in-a-blanket, smoked salmon meatballs, beer-battered bloomin’ onions, cheese sausage balls, hot crab dip, creole shrimp sliders with tomatillo salsa, bratwurst pockets, candied bacon and corn cotija dip, lima bean guacamole, kettle corn, blue-cheese-stuffed mushrooms, corn dog fritters, pulled-pork fajitas, three-cheese quesadillas with kalamata olives, grilled jalapenos with spicy Ranch Dressing, breaded potato skins, mashed potato puffs, Sriracha steak skewers, chili lime mozzarella sticks, meatball-sub cupcakes, and, of course, chocolate-covered peanut butter footballs.

Those of you over fifty who’ve experienced your first colonoscopy know exactly what I was doing on Super Bowl Weekend. And it was not enjoying any of these delectable world-beat mashups. In lieu of eating, I stayed close to the loo.

By far the worst part of a colonoscopy is what happens before you get to the doctor’s office. You must, by any means necessary, empty out your five-feet of colon. This takes some doing. First you must stop eating berries and nuts, or any high fiber anything; then no fresh veggies and fruit; then only meat, fish or dairy; then clear liquids. By Super Bowl Sunday I was ravenous and Big-Foot grouchy with a label on my forehead that said, “Feed me!”

Needless to say, I regretfully declined my friend’s Super Bowl party invitation, and instead — to cap it all off — stayed home drinking 16 ounces of sodium sulfate, potassium sulfate and magnesium sulfate, followed by 32 additional ounces of water. This whole routine twice.

The colonoscopy itself is a relatively simple procedure. My doc even allowed me to stay awake for the first portion of it because I wanted to see what I was made of. There is a lot of glistening pink inside the human body which never sees the light of day (if one is fortunate). The colon is fascinatingly alive and squirmy, writhing and shining, a gem-like underwater creature whose job is to extract or reabsorb water from the food the body takes in.

It is curled up inside the abdomen like a big worm, running up the left side, then across just below the stomach and liver, and finally down the right side of the body, making a rounded rectangle. It was demoted from its name “large intestine” now to be more commonly called “colon.” Basically it handles all the dirty work that the small intestine has left over for it after removing nutrients from our food. The colon manages this last stage of digestion, where, once or twice a day, as one website quaintly says, “waste is escorted from the body.” Scientifically this process is called peristalsis and takes around 36 hours. All that wriggling I saw inside my colon — that contracting and relaxing — is how it does its job.

After I’d see enough of my insides on a big screen beside me, I said to nice nurse Nadia, “Ok, hit me with some drugs.” Fentanyl knocked me out in seconds. I drifted obliviously in La La Land and woke up 45 minutes later to medical talk burbling all around me. The whole journey of ascending, transverse and descending was completed. I do not actually remember how I got dressed.

So I was robbed of Super Bowl levity — yay Philly! — but now we’ve got the spectacle of the Winter Olympics to take in, with more opportunity for creative snacks. And I can put the joys of the colonoscopy away for another decade.

Don’t get me wrong though. I’ve been cavalier about this preventative procedure because as one gets older it’s the best way to face indignities of the body. But the American Cancer Society says one in 20 Americans will get colorectal cancer in their lifetimes. Don’t let it be you. Colonoscopy’s are a pain in the — well, you know — but they save lives.