At first blush, the thought of sitting on your tail for four hours, drinking beer from your overpriced seat while you watch other men exercise, doesn't seem like much of an adventure. But I like to think that adventure is not just physical, that sometimes mental adventures--like paying taxes, or answering the "Does this make me look fat?" question--can be just as tough, maybe even more so. And the mental, physical, and financial logistics of attending the Super Bowl, especially this Super Bowl, make a yak expedition to Mongolia seem lightweight by comparison.

My decision to attend what turned out to be the most anticipated, most viewed, most improbable Super Bowl in history seemed like a no-brainer. When I'm not regaling you with thrilling tales of derring-do and unsolicited borderline negligent advice for the road, I work as a producer for a daily television show. We would be taking our program on the road to Arizona for the week leading up to Super Bowl XLII (that would be Number 42, for those of you not fat enough to be familiar with Roman numerals). So faced with the opportunity to check one of those "must do" things off my list, it only seemed logical that I'd stick around and attend the game.

But as it turns out, logic has no place at the Super Bowl. Or in Arizona.

The state of Arizona may be famous for retirees, cacti, golf courses, and cosmetically enhanced middle-aged women in SUVs (forget Missouri, this should be the Show-Me State), but it's not short on adrenaline. In typically California fashion, I hadn't been to our neighboring state in nearly nine years, during which time Arizona had continued to be overrun by California refugees. I had made just two previous trips to the state, both while in college: once during a spontaneous finals-week road trip to the Grand Canyon (the Canyon was amazing, my end-of-semester grades not so much), and again on a cross-country camping expedition with a high school buddy. I had remembered liking the place, but I never fully trust the desert. It's nothing personal; I'm just more of a water guy. And it's not that I even spend much time on the water, other than those surfing lessons my wife got me as a birthday present (she might as well have written "Learn How To Inhale Salt Water While Getting Abused By A Longboard" on the card) and a collegiate sailing class where our final exam was an overnight sail to Catalina Island. I'm not a beach bum--in fact, I may be the only non-albino in Southern California without a decent tan. But I prefer the coast to the desert. So I wasn't sure what to expect in Arizona. I just knew that I had to see the game.

My problem was a simple matter of this Super Bowl turning into arguably the most highly anticipated NFL game since the AFL-NFL merger: the New England Patriots attempting to achieve perfection by beating a team of scrappy underdogs from that overlooked small market, New York City. Ticket prices soared from their face value of $700 to as much as $30,000. People offered their apartments, their cars, their kidneys, their attractive cousins, in exchange for a coveted ticket. Willy Wonka didn't have this much ticket demand. This was going to be the toughest ticket of all time, and as father of twin girls I was naturally broke, so this was going to be some feat.

Tickets hovered around the $5,000 range, which was approximately $5,000 more than I reasonably had to spend. I strongly considered going home and scrapping the whole plan. But as I walked the pleasant streets of Scottsdale, I saw a plaque devoted to legendary Arizona adventurer John Wesley Powell. The man had made the first passage through the Grand Canyon, and that was after losing an arm in the Civil War. J-Dub inspired me. I had to find a way.

So on game day I made my way to something called the University of Phoenix Stadium. It seemed impossible that the Super Bowl was going to be played at a venue with such a ridiculous name, but all the signs and Northeast fans with funny accents told me I was in the right place. There the city of Phoenix had taken an unusual step: they had rounded up all the ticket scalpers who normally prey on innocent marks like me, and herded them off into a special roped-off ticket resale area. It was Broadway Joe meets L.A.'s Broadway Skid Row district.

The roped-off resale area was like a Wall Street trading floor, if the stock market was run by hit men and guys kicked out of sports bars. A colorful collection of characters--I'm talking goatees, gold teeth, eye patches, I'm pretty sure I even saw a guy with a peg leg and a parrot on his shoulder--waved around stacks of cash, stadium maps, and, of course, those coveted Super Bowl tickets.

Somewhere inside the unfortunately named stadium, Tom Brady and Eli Manning were gearing up for the biggest game of their lives. And there I was, five hundred yards away, haggling with cretins who wanted to charge me a month's salary for those little slivers of cardboard with the Lombardi Trophy on it. Outside the Ticket Pit, Phoenix police officers pretended to keep order.

"So, is scalping legal here?" I asked one of them.

"Not outside the roped-off area."

There we were, then, a band of hardscrabble NFL fans desperate for a ticket, battling it out in a makeshift marketplace apparently above and beyond the laws of the state of Arizona. Eager to both see the game and not get ripped off, I waited. And waited. I turned down several quotes that were more expensive than my car. My patience looked like it would pay off: the market dropped faster than Florida real estate. But then, as kickoff neared and fans who'd flown across the country turned desperate, prices surged upward again. I had to time this just right. And as someone who tried to start a dot-com in 2001, and tried to buy a house in 2006, I knew a thing or two about timing.

When I found a price that felt almost right (because "just right" doesn’t happen when you're scalping Super Bowl tickets), I whipped out enough cash to fund the entire national budget of Togo for four years. And I have to be honest: I can't remember the last time my heart raced like that. This was the moment...I had come so far. And by so far, I mean a 65-minute flight.

I did the deed. And then I held in my hands a ticket to the most anticipated sporting event in years.

I paid a respectable amount for my ducat. I feel even prouder of the fact that I paid half of the cheapest going rate on most web sites earlier in the day. I feel less proud of the fact that had I taken that amount and put it in my kids' college fund instead, it would eventually have paid for roughly four semesters at Yale.

But when it comes to checking those precious items off of life's list, money doesn't matter. What matters is that I was there. And that the Giants did their part in making sure the game lived up to its absurd hype and even more absurd entry fee. But at that point, the quality of the game was almost an afterthought: I had set out to go to the game, and I had done just that without getting totally fleeced by an entrepreneurial Hell's Angel. That was the real shocker, not the Giants' 17-14 upset.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go find a six-pack, a map of K-2, and a straitjacket.

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