Hey, you. Yeah, you. Blog reader. Sports fan. I bet that you enjoy sports, don’t you? Sure you do. Few things beat a really sublime bounce pass-dunk combo in transition, or a loosely spiraling ball landing between the safety and the corner for a first down. Few things can top the sheer joy of a college basketball comeback, or of a front-to-back passing display that ends with a goal.

We may complain about sports a lot, get mad when our favorite teams don’t win, but that’s not really the point, is it? It’s those little moments. That’s why we watch.

Tribune columnist Mike Downey? He wants to take your aesthetic sports joy and crush it with a ball-peen hammer. What’s worse is that I can’t tell if he knows what joy is:

This season is over.

Go home. Nothing to see here. You are not going to win the Super Bowl, the NBA championship or the Stanley Cup. No school in Illinois’ boundaries is going anywhere near a BCS bowl game or the Final Four. Even your soccer team’s bubble burst. Your teams are toast.

If money is tight for you, as it is for so many out there, spend it on something else. Your teams are ordinary. Average at best. You have as much chance to see a championship won around here as you have of going to a Starbucks and buying a cup of coffee for 10 cents. Forget it.

You see, because coffee at Starbucks is expensive. $4, man! In Downey’s day, $4 could get you a handjob and a ticket to a Bears game! Which of course he would not attend, because he hates fun. Anyway. The above is the crux of Downey’s column today: Stop having fun. Stop paying attention. Stop caring. Because if your teams aren’t going to win, why would you?

Sunday’s (cough) contest in Green Bay was the proof. It exposed the Bears as so-so in every way. Don’t delude yourselves. They might yet make it to the playoffs, but so what? Do you honestly believe this team that lost 37-3 is good enough to regroup and go all the way? If you do, get a life.

Sad. Here I was, this whole season, thinking the Bears were a Super Bowl team. Thinking they could win the Super Bowl. Actually, no, I wasn’t, because my TV works, and I can watch the Bears on Sunday and see that their defense is suddenly mediocre and their offense has no wide receivers and Devin Hester’s skills for returning footballs have all but vanished.

See, most of us knew this about the Bears already. Downey? He’s just now figuring it out:

A legitimate case could be made a few weeks ago for the Bears getting back to a Super Bowl. I mean it.

“A legitimate case could be made …” No, it could not. And any time you have to say “I mean it” after you write something should set off some sort of internal writer’s alarm: “Warning. Warning. What you just wrote is likely not true. Warning.” I imagine this alarm to be a blinking, rotating red light, like in a fallout shelter.

Name a team from the NFC besides the Giants that looks the least bit super. Sunday was the deal-breaker. No way this team goes to a Super Bowl now. Morale is shot. The quarterback has a limp. The defense is in disarray.

I’m sorry, but if that’s what it took to convince you the Bears weren’t going to win the Super Bowl, fine. But like I said: Most of us weren’t all that surprised.

Anyway, Downey goes on to explain that no Chicago-area team is good this year, that the Bulls won’t win the NBA championship — another trenchant piece of analysis — and that people should only watch the kinesthetic beauty that is Derrick Rose if they care about “entertainment.”

But some of us do care about that. That’s why some of us — most of us, I would argue — watch basketball, or football, or whatever. Because the sports entertain us, and because we like to be entertained. We don’t always define sports by their ends. Sometimes the means are enough.

If Mike Downey, professional sports columnist, person paid to write about sports … if he can’t understand that, well, I don’t know what to tell him. Except, I guess, in the words of Max Fischer, to find something he enjoys doing, and do it the rest of his life.

For Max, that was Rushmore. For Mike, I assume it’s kicking kittens in the stomach and stealing lollipops from small children.