I will check this again in a few minutes.

But I don’t think I can get the Super Bowl live on iTunes over here. The system is talking about a “download,” so the $7.95 we paid is, I think, for a copy of the game … when it’s over.

Yes, I will check. Again.

The point here being … I have never missed a Super Bowl. I’ve seen them all. And you have to be at least 50 years old to say that — unless you really were paying attention when you were 5 or 4 or 3 years old.

But, finally, I am going to miss one. Live, at least.

My previous Super Bowl-less close calls, so far.

Super Bowl I: Packers and Chiefs, January of 1967. Before it was even known as the Super Bowl. I was a adolescent living Long Beach. The game was the at Coliseum, and it wasn’t a sell out, so the Los Angeles market was blacked out.

My father was not a big sports fan, but he liked football about as much as anything, and I distinctly remember him going up on the roof of the house and rigging up some sort of antenna at the highest point … and we pulled in a fuzzy picture from San Diego and sat and stared at that for three hours.

Super Bowl XIII, 1979: I was covering college basketball for the San Bernardino Sun, and UCLA and USC were on the road in Arizona. Someone was going to play that night. Or maybe it was Monday night. Anyway, I was in a motel in the Phoenix area, and after somebody’s shootaround early that day I went back and turned on the game and watched the Steelers defeat the Cowboys, 35-31, in what was at the time nominated as the best SB yet. Even though Dallas never had the ball and a chance to win.

Super Bowl XXII, 1988: I didn’t really come close to missing this, though a couple of my co-workers may remember that way. I drove down to San Diego to meet up with colleagues Gregg Patton and Steve Dilbeck and, well, it took me longer than I expected, and I had missed the last media bus, and the two of them were fairly agitated, but we hopped a cab and made kickof, no sweat.Well, maybe a little sweat.

Super Bowl XLI, 2007: After nearly two decades of seeing everything on TV (29 games) or in person (11) … the first goofy situation. I was on a cruise to Hawaii, and we were anchored somewhere near the Big Island, and they had the thing up on some big screen in one of the entertainment lounges. The picture was grainy and I didn’t watch the whole game — which began early in the afternoon. The room was crowded, but I stayed long enough to see that the Colts would win without much trouble.

Super Bowl XLIV, 2010: I think I’m out of luck, for this one. After 43 straight live viewings.  iTunes isn’t live. I haven’t paid for TV here in the apartment, but if I had I could watch it on cable — one of the few games shown here in Abu Dhabi. Or,  if I felt like staying up all night — it’s pushing 4 ayem here  I might have been able to crash at a co-workers house, from The National … Oh, and the final shot — hope for some live bandit streaming somewhere. But it appears as if the NFL is too thorough for any site to come up with anything. It’s such a cheesy thing, anyway, poking around on sites that claim to have the game … and you don’t know what kind of spyware/junk/viruses  might be attaching themselves to your machine.

So … I’m watching espn.com’s “game cast.” I seethe Colts are up 3-0. They should win, no problem. Though I wouldn’t mind the Saints winning, just to be strange.

So, the streak ends at 43. Maybe I can see a tape version later in the day — like, say, when I shouldn’t be dead asleep … and declare a 44-game “same day” streak.

Final: Colts 31, Saints 17.