AMERICA AT LARGE:NO THANKS. For half a dozen years that has been my standard response when the New Year rolls around and one or another of my former colleagues suggests how much fun it would be to get together at the Super Bowl. In one's retirement from the daily newspaper dodge one comes to appreciate some of life's little pleasures, and being able to kick back and watch the Super Bowl on television is one of them.

For 35 years, Super Sunday was one of the more important dates on my calendar. I covered all but two Super Bowls that took place over those three and a half decades. It took me 20 years of that to make an important discovery, which is that a Super Bowl Week is one of those events, like festivities surrounding the Kentucky Derby, that loses much of its charm when endured in a state of sobriety.

And most of the Super Bowls I covered took place in the traditional warm-weather sites like Miami and New Orleans and Los Angeles. I did cover the disastrous attempt to stage Super Bowl XVI in snowbound Pontiac, Michigan, which sort of played hell with the annual Super Bowl Golf Classic, and another in Minneapolis, where the Golf Classic was thoughtfully replaced by a Super Bowl ice-fishing derby, which sort of leads us to Storyline Theme One for Super Bowl XLV: The Weather.

When Dallas owner Jerry Jones was awarded the rights to stage this year’s game in his state-of-the-art new stadium in suburban Arlington, it probably didn’t occur to many that unlike, say, Houston, which successfully hosted Super Bowl XXXVIII seven years ago, North Texas did not necessarily represent a warm-weather site. Televised reports from the scene thus far have been transmitted by bundled-up talking heads dressed as if they’re broadcasting from the North Pole.

In retrospect, those of us who covered the Manny Pacquiao-Joshua Clottey fight at Cowboy’s Stadium didn’t realise how lucky we were.

That fight took place in March of last year on an evening sufficiently balmy that the retractable roof remained open throughout the undercard. In 2011, just six weeks earlier in the calendar year, a freakish winter storm left most of the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex coated in three inches of glare ice.

Sportswriters, bused to and from the heated stadium in luxury coaches, could be forgiven if they didn’t notice, since the highways leading to the Super Bowl venue are receiving round-the-clock grooming, a practice which will continue through Sunday’s game. The Texas authorities have taken some stick over this, because five days ahead of the football game battalions of vehicles armed with de-icing spreaders, followed by another gang of trucks dumping sand on the roads, assiduously maintained the access routes to Cowboys Stadium.

So diligent have they been in this commitment they’ve all but ignored other routes, like the ones Dallas and Fort Worth residents drive to get to work. Fishtailing commuters trying to negotiate non-Super Bowl highways have been slip-sliding away all week, with multi-car pile-ups an all-too-common result.

It does sort of fill one with a sense of foreboding about 2014, when the game is scheduled to be played at Giants Stadium, but at least, unlike Texans, motorists in New York and New Jersey are accustomed to driving in snow and ice.

Storyline Theme Two has been Cowboys Stadium itself. There is some irony in the fact that a game representing one of those rare match-ups of original old NFL teams rich in tradition – the Green Bay Packers were founded in 1919, the Pittsburgh Steelers in 1933 – is taking place in a space-age venue replete with bells and whistles.

The expectation had been the young Packers, representing a franchise playing in its first Super Bowl in 13 years, might be more cowed by the limelight than their Steeler counterparts, participants in the ultimate game for the third time in half a dozen years. The Packers have been dazzled all right – dazzled mostly by the opulent luxury of the Cowboys’ lockerroom facilities, which as the nominal home team, they have inherited for the week.

When Sunday’s participants were herded, in game uniforms, into Cowboys Stadium for the benefit of a few thousand newsmen and television reporters for Tuesday’s traditional Media Day festivities, it emerged that Storylines Three and Four would be a too-close-to-call dead heat between (a) the contrition, or lack thereof, of Pittsburgh quarterback Ben Roethlisberger, who began this season in street clothes, serving out an NFL-mandated suspension resulting from an alleged sexual attack in the toilet of a Georgia saloon last March and ends it with a chance to say “I’m going to Disney World!” and (b) Brad Keisel’s beard.

After labouring in relative obscurity for nine NFL seasons, Keisel, on a whim, decided to grow the celebrated Super Bowl whiskers before the current season began. Six months later he looks like a replacement guitarist for ZZ Top, with a look dubbed “The Scruff of Legend” by a metropolitan Pittsburgh paper.

Keisel’s massive beard, which rivals in length team-mate Troy Polamalu’s mane of curly locks, now has over 20,000 Facebook fans, and has managed to attract enough attention that Keisel was elected to the Pro Bowl for the first time in his career.

“The worst part is the hairballs,” the Steelers defensive end told a gaggle of Media Day inquisitors. “Every once in a while I brush it out to check for birds and squirrels.”

Super Bowl Storyline Theme Five emerged as what we recognised from prior experience as another persistent Media Day trend – reporters reporting about other reporters.

Inez Sainz, the “newswoman” for Mexico’s TV Azteca, who was the subject of a firestorm earlier this year when she was allegedly the object of sexual harassment by some members of the New York Jets, showed up for Media Day in provocative costumery that fell somewhere between the usual attire of Fort Worth hookers and Cowboys’ cheerleaders, and proceeded to further distinguish herself by unsuccessfully attempting to interview a fellow member of the media pack, Cincinnati Bengals receiver Chad Ochocinco in Spanish.

(Think about it for a minute. If Chad, ne Johnson, did speak Spanish, would he have changed his name to Ochocinco?)

Storylne Theme Seven: The storybook season of Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers, who, four years removed from the long shadow cast by his predecessor, Bret Favre, has come into his own as a bona fide superstar. Rodgers, who handled himself with aplomb, at least in the broadcast interviews we saw, revealed that he had benefited from the counsel of veteran cornerback Charles Woodson, one of the few Green Bay players to have previously endured a Super Bowl Media Day.

So what, exactly, did Woodson tell him?

“He told me,” said Rodgers, “‘Don’t say anything stupid’.”