Football and Thanksgiving.

No sport is more synonymous with a national holiday.

Baseball used to be more closely associated with the Fourth of July. Back in the day, town teams might play each other or a bunch of people would get together at the town square for a friendly game. Times have changed, though, and outside of the occasional All-Star tournament or pick-up game at the family picnic, you’d be hard pressed to find a baseball game if you don’t turn on the television.

Pigskin and Turkey Day still thrive, though. Many families, friends and neighbors will be getting together for a friendly game of touch this morning. Others will be traveling to Portland for the Deering-Portland game.

I’ve always envied states such as Massachusetts, where Thanksgiving football is played throughout the state, but I’m not going to nail the Maine Principals’ Association for discouraging other schools from starting a similar tradition here (Cony and Gardiner will be butting heads Friday afternoon). Winter sports tryouts are this week and the season starts two weeks from Friday. It’s too much to ask the basketball, hockey and wrestling teams to give up a week of preparation for an exhibition football game.

So that leaves most of us with pro and college football to get our pigskin fix with the turkey fixin’s. The day starts with the Detroit Lions. They usually get up for a rare appearance on national TV, but sometimes they just stink worse than the cabbage your mother always insisted on making for Thanksgiving dinner, even though no one under 85 ate it. It’s often a boring game, a good excuse to sleep off the tryptophan.

The red-hot Green Bay Packers are visiting this year and that gives it a little extra zing. There’s no John Madden around to kiss Brett Favre’s butt or talk about how much “turducken” he had to eat on the bus, so that should make the lumpy gravy go down easier.

The Dallas Cowboys are our late-afternoon hosts. Maybe the wine with dinner just makes it seem this way, but their games are usually more memorable. I don’t think I’ve seen a complete Cowboys game on Thanksgiving since 1978, however, because I’ve usually either washing the dishes or napping by 5 p.m. Maybe I’ll try to get those things out of the way early this year because I certainly don’t want to miss a moment of Eric Mangini’s misery when the Cowboys annihilate his New York Jets, 74-0. I think I’m going to save my slice of chocolate creme pie for the fourth quarter. Watching the J-E-T-S suffering more humiliation makes everything sweeter.

Lions and Cowboys. That used to be all she wrote for Thanksgiving football. By 7 p.m., everybody is ready to watch a movie anyway. But the NFL, in its infinite greed, decided we needed a night game, so that means Indianapolis and Atlanta. I think I’m going to pass. Not that I could watch it if I so chose. The game is on the NFL Network, which nobody gets (we’ll be writing more about this travesty soon, because there are going to be a lot of unhappy football fans in a couple of weeks). If you’re still jonesing for football at that point, you can always watch USC play Arizona State on ESPN.

I don’t think I’m going to need any more football tonight. An antacid, sure. An extra notch in my belt, no doubt. But I will have had enough pigskin to hold me over until Sunday.