My football season ended Monday night.

After a highly contested game, Alabama defeated Clemson to take the football championship trophy and the designation as the No. 1 college team in the nation and, after its performance in the recent bowls, putting the SEC on top of the football world.

And while there are still playoffs to be contested in the National Football League as the professional season heads to its climax with the Super Bowl, I’ll be doing something else. And I won’t be watching the Super Bowl, not even to see the commercials. I haven’t watched the NFL’s championship game in 20 years, and I don’t plan to now.

I’m not sure when I lost interest in pro football. I guess I just go tired of watching prima donnas and overpriced marginal athletes performing on the stage.

Ignoring the Super Bowl was easy. The game was overhyped and usually didn’t live up to its billing as a premier clash of champions.

And I miss the old AFL-NFL rivalry.

Back in the days when color TV was still a novelty and cell phones were something you saw in science fiction, there were two professional football leagues, the long-established National Football League and the upstart American Football League.

The AFL, which began playing in 1960, got into draft wars with the NFL for top college prospects and picked up older, veteran NFL players who had been cut by their teams.

For years, the AFL got no respect from the NFL, and it led Lamar Hunt, owner of the Kansas City Chiefs, to recommend a game to prove which program was better.

He called it a “Super Bowl.”

There was speculation as the first championship game between Green Bay and Kansas City approached as to which program was better. Green Bay won the first Super Bowl in 1967 and the next year defeated the Oakland Raiders to take the second title in 1968.

Then came Joe Namath and the Jets, who beat the then-Baltimore Colts, and the leagues began developing parity. I believe the NFL heads wanted to talk merger after Kansas City under Hank Stram dismantled Minnesota in a Super Bowl.

And merger killed the thrill of the Super Bowl.

When the AFL and NFL were separate leagues, the Super Bowl had an edge. There were no interleague games, so they didn’t know each other’s schemes and there was that factor of the unexpected — no previous experience to go by.

That factor is gone now. The teams facing each other in the Super Bowl will have played each other at least once, maybe twice, over the past year. And the edge is gone.

I want to go back to that edge. I miss the unknown that came with a contest between two separate leagues, and I wish it was back. That’s why I enjoy college football. There is always that unknown, even when to annual rivals face each other.

And in sports, I like the unknown mixed with speculation.