Claire Danes's next opponent is Tom Brady. Associated Press

VERY IMPORTANT, SEVERE WARNING: The following sports column actually contains potential spoilers for people who are not fully caught up on Season 2 of the television series "Homeland." It also contains potential spoilers for the 2012 NFL season, like the SAN DIEGO CHARGERS ARE UNDEFEATED AND SUPER BOWL-BOUND. Or something like that. Consider yourself warned. And spoiled.

The New England Patriots host the San Francisco 49ers on Sunday night, and this is a big football game, perhaps the biggest big football game since last Monday, when the Patriots played Houston in what was expected to be the biggest big football game of the season, but wasn't big at all, or really even football, because the Texans walked out on the field and took a long, placid nap.

But we all know what the most important television event will be Sunday night:

The "Homeland" finale.

I am going to assume if you're still reading this, you are watching "Homeland." If you are not watching "Homeland," I do not want to spoil it for you by revealing anything about the plot. Really: You don't want to know a single thing. I'll just give you a very skeletal outline of the show: "Homeland" is a situation comedy about the high jinks occurring at a small FM radio station in Cincinnati in the late 1970s and early 1980s. OK, I already feel I've revealed too much. Now get yourself to an iPad and catch up.

I held out on "Homeland" for a long time. I didn't have any particular objection. I just watch too much sports on TV. Especially if you watch a lot of Jets football, you develop a mistrustful relationship with your television; bad things always happen when you turn it on. But it was impossible to miss the popular enthusiasm for the Showtime series. I began to find myself in social situations in which people would realize they all watched the show, and they'd shout "ZOMGHOMELAND-BESTSHOWEVER" and break away in a little lunar module of communal pop culture. Over time, that lunar module got larger and larger, and it became clear I was on the barren outside of something big. So one day this autumn, I broke down and watched the pilot episode. Then immediately watched another. And another. You know how this goes. It's like seeing someone attack a bag of sour-cream-and-onion chips after a bad day at work. I could not stop. I think I watched the first season in two days. You may think this is pathetic. I do not. I was ready to re-enter society, get back into the cultural slipstream.

There's no equivalent to this in sports. You either experience the game in real time, or you don't. Let me be the five-millionth person to testify that you can't DVR a sporting event. You just can't. I mean, you can actually DVR it, and I have, but no matter how successfully you block out spoilers on Twitter and text messages and persuade yourself you are going to watch this prerecorded sporting event all the way through, it's only a few minutes before you are fast-forwarding through not just the commercials, but the first quarter, and then the second quarter, and then anything that looks pretty boring, and then fast-forwarding all the way to the final two minutes of the game, which you only watch if the score is close. This is what everyone does. The whole appeal of sports on TV is the moment. There's no catching up on Netflix.

"Homeland" is not live. (At least I don't think so—and wow, that would just change everything.) It's not fast-forward-able. You have to watch the whole thing A to Z—and pay attention!—or none of it makes sense. Even if you can watch it A to Z, it still might not make sense. I guess it's OK at this point in the story to lay out some basics of the story. It's about a decorated prisoner of war and a CIA mission to stop a terrorist plot on U.S. soil. But it's not really about that. "Homeland" is a hall of mirrors. Its appeal is its murkiness—every week, the truth gets a little more slippery. Nobody is exactly whom they appear to be. It is also a little loopy. There's sex. There's jazz. There's prescription drugs. There's Claire Danes. There's also Mandy Patinkin, who is the best thing in it. Seriously, if anything happened to Mandy Patinkin on "Homeland," it would be like the Yankees trading Derek Jeter to the Jets.

"Homeland" will drive you a little batty. It can be exhausting, sorting through its layers of intrigue and accusation. Duplicity's common. Everyone's suspicious, and "good" can be a hallucination. After a while, you have no idea who to believe. It's like the Red Sox under Bobby Valentine.

But that's exactly the attraction. Sports is consumed with facts and the end result—who wins; the inarguable case for who's the best; a clear and obvious solution. The nebulous world of "Homeland" cannot be distilled into a 30-second debate. It's gray, frustrating, messy, seductive. I can't wait until Sunday. But I suspect there won't be a final score.