The 2024-2025 NFL season got underway last night in Kansas City, with the Chiefs kicking off their quest to become the first team to win three straight Super Bowls.

For fans of the sport, the start of a new football season is exciting. Every team has a chance to win it all, whether they play on the gridirons here in Central Oregon or in America’s largest stadia.

Non-football fans might not be as excited. They will find spouses glued to their televisions on Sundays from here on out, when everyone knows we should be out picking apples instead.

But it’s worth noting — even here in Bend, more than 300 miles away from the nearest NFL team — that professional football is among the last vestiges of mainstream American culture.

If you were going to add a second, it might be Taylor Swift. When the two cultural forces combined last season, NFL fandom reached new heights, especially with women. After Swift started dating a hunky Kansas City tight end, Travis Kelce, the share of Gen Z and millennial women with favorable opinions of the NFL grew 11 percentage points to 64%, according to a brand survey. Even back in 2021, a poll noted that 46 percent of NFL fans were women.

Tay Tay and the NFL is a marriage made in pop culture heaven. And the NFL is already looking for ways to exploit it.

The second game of the season will be played tonight in Brazil as the league sets out to conquer a new continent. Other games this year will be played in London. NFL games are scheduled on Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Others will be in direct competition with the newly-expanded college football playoffs.

These are the moves of a cultural behemoth, gathering momentum while competitors founder.

In television, movies, music and media over the past decades, our tastes have splintered and audiences have, too. The monoculture that dominated America since the first days of coast-to-coast radio has dissolved.

Except for the NFL, that is. It’s one the last vestiges left of gathering around the hearth to watch the show, and then talk about it at the proverbial water cooler (remember those?) every Monday.

For proof, think about this: In 2023, 93 of 100 most-watched shows on broadcast television were NFL games. That’s a staggering domination of the American pop cultural psyche, at least in broadcast television, itself a splintered and bifurcated platform.

Other audiences have shriveled in recent decades, while the NFL continues to gather more eyeballs.

On TV, Stephen Colbert has lost 80 percent of David Letterman’s “Late Show” audience from the early 1990s. He’s still today’s top-drawing night show host, but reaches millions fewer people every night than Letterman did. This is despite the fact that there are 100 million more Americans in 2024 than their were in 1992.

Audiences long ago stormed the media gatekeepers who once told people what to pay attention to. No current culture critic has the power of Siskel and Ebert, and no evening news anchor has the power and reach of Walter Cronkite.

There is nothing wrong with this, generally. The rise of niche genres has allowed comic book culture to flourish, and low-tech productions like podcasts mean there is now an infinite amount of content available for every hobby or interest. Many are happier finding a specialized show that they and 1,000 other like-minded people consume, rather than everyone being shoehorned in to watching the same mass-marketed sitcom.

But next time you’re stuck in the Les Schwab waiting room while the techs put on your winter tires, you won’t be able bring up your favorite podcast. The chances someone beside you has even heard of it is slim to nil. The chances it will resonate with them are about the same.

Your best bet is still — as it has been since the beginning of time — is to talk about the weather. If that doesn’t work, your next and last option is the NFL. If Kansas City wins another Super Bowl, you can be sure that people will be talking about it. Especially if it involves a proposal and Taylor Swift.