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If there is one thing in this world that I love it is eating bread in a restaurant.

A couple of weekends ago, I went to an Italian restaurant for dinner with some friends. The first thing I asked for, even before the menus, was a basket of bread. I had eye-scanned the joint upon sitting down and noticed other tables had bread. Free bread. On their tables. So I wanted a basket. Then I wanted another one. And another.

I asked the waiter for – and received – five bread baskets during dinner. The thing is, why do I love bread so much when I go out to eat? It’s not like I don’t have bread at home. I have plenty of bread. Bagels, pita bread, wheat bread, pumpernickel.

But when I go out, I turn into Teen Wolf hooked on bread.

“Bread? They have bread? Give me some bread! You have any more bread? Give me five motherfucking baskets of bread!”

The Princess, though, always gives me the “Don’t fill up on bread” speech. Why shouldn’t I have as much bread as I want? It’s free. And I’ll still eat my dinner. I’m paying for it, after all. Maybe they don’t eat restaurant bread in her home state of Missouri, I don’t know. But that is a fundamental difference between me and my Midwestern girlfriend.

You know what else is a fundamental difference? Sports. Specifically, college football. She couldn’t care less about it. When her alma mater Mizzou reached the number one ranking in the nation recently, I was more excited than she was. Hell, had a shit freak about it (and deservedly so).

“Do you understand how big this is?” I asked her.

Princess: “No.”

Arjewtino: “It’s huge. They haven’t been number one since 1960.”

Princess: “I don’t care.”

Arjewtino: “How can you not care? I would kill for UCLA to be number one and have a shot at the national championship. It upsets me that you don’t appreciate it.”

Princess: “Is Project Runway on?”

One of the first conversations The Princess and I had when we first met was about Mizzou. She told me she graduated from there and I instantly launched into my proud diatribe of UCLA guard Tyus Edney going coast-to-coast against her school in the 1995 March Madness tournament.

She looked at me like I had bragged about my ability to do simple arithmetic at the speed of light.

But some people, I suppose, just don’t care about sports. I don’t know who these people are and for the most part I don’t want to know. As long as they don’t stop me from watching/following/caring/obsessing about my sports teams, they can live their own warped and empty lives.

But the reason we as people love sports and root for our teams – teams to which we don’t even belong — is a very interesting one when you think about it.

From a psychological standpoint, it is in our nature to need an enemy, an opponent which a group or team can all rally against. We need a clear battle between a perceived good and evil. From an evolutionary standpoint, we cheer and wear our team’s colors because we needed to band together as if we were going to defeat woolly mammoths and saber tooth tigers.

Sports fans understand the joy of a triumph and the heartbreak of defeat like it’s a matter of life and death. We do so because for our ancestors, it really was about life and death. The closer we bond together against an enemy, the more likely we are to survive and pass on our genes.

So I suppose I understand why to The Princess it’s not important, but that bonding with her friends over a nesting activity – like her book club or pillow fighting league – is.

Yes, I suppose I do understand. Still, it was pretty awesome when after shaking my head at her for not getting the full extent of Mizzou’s number one ranking, she turned to me and asked me this:

Princess: “We beat KU, though, right?”

Arjewtino: “Uh, yeah.”

Princess: “Good. I hate KU.”

There’s hope for her yet.