Which sport do Americans like most?

It was the same in 2013 as it was in 1985, and every year since.

The National Football League.

Duh.

We like our danger and violence, and we like our color and strategy and cheerleaders, and tidy three-hour blocs mapped out on Sundays and three nights a week.

The stat is 35 percent of Americans choose the NFL as their favorite sport.

What I find interesting in the Harris Interactive Survey released earlier this month is the order of the sports lagging behind the NFL.

Baseball has been trailing the NFL since the Harris people started their sports survey, 29 years ago. In truth, the NFL probably had passed baseball before then, though it was close at the start — a 1 point difference, 24-23, in 1985.

The national pastime is now the favorite sport of only 14 percent of people in the U.S., 21 points behind the NFL. (One suggestion is that baseball took a big hit in 1994, when the World Series was cancelled, and has never recovered.)

Presumably, baseball’s owners are more concerned with the sports in their rear-view mirrors than the NFL, which has gone around the bend, up ahead. (At least, until the Surgeon General bans football as a health threat.)

(And, by the way: Baseball skews wealthier, than football. And more Latino, and less African-American.)

College football is third, at 11 percent — meaning 46 percent of Americans choose televised football as their No. 1 sport, when we add the college 11 to the NFL 35. American football, a game basically no one else on the planet plays. Hmmm.

Then comes auto racing (hello, Nascar), at 7 percent. OK. About right.

This next one surprised me, because I thought the NBA would do better than 6 percent.

(My hunch is that both baseball and the NBA would move up dramatically if the 2,300 respondents had been asked for the first- and second-favorite sports.)

Then comes the small numbers.

Hockey at 5 percent. Higher than I would have thought, actually. That many Canadians have moved to the U.S.?

Men’s college basketball at 3 percent. Presumably, people living in college towns who don’t have an NBA team nearby. But it makes you think about how much a top college player takes to the NBA — a level of interest among the American public only half that of the NBA itself.

Then come the five sports with 2 percent “favorite sport” rankings:

Men’s golf, men’s soccer, swimming, boxing, men’s tennis.

About those five:

–Golf seems about right. A low number, sure, but advertisers kill for those demographics. (Oh, and golf had been steady at 4 percent before the Tiger Woods scandals of 2009. That’s how important he is to the game.)

–Men’s soccer. I thought this would be higher by now. Isn’t every globally-plugged-in American under the age of 30 a soccer fan now? If not of Major League Soccer, of the English Premier League?

“Soccer: The sport of the future.” Still.

–Swimming? I have no idea what this is doing there. You can’t even consume much swimming on television. Swimming gets the same numbers as soccer? Did Harris survey Michael Phelps’s fan club?

–Boxing. For a dead sport, not bad. It remains the favorite pastime of 1 American in 50. I wonder, though, if 1) the boxing fans know Muhammad Ali ain’t coming back and 2) if some of the numbers here came from (predictably) confused MMA fans.

–Men’s tennis. Hmm. This is the one that makes you think, “Wait, we still haven’t had a women’s sport on this list.” Very interesting. Presumably half of the survey respondents were women, too, and they apparently don’t particularly like women’s golf, women’s basketball, women’s soccer — or women’s tennis.

Then come the 1’s — bowling, horse racing, track and field, women’s tennis, women’s college basketball.

The first three would have come in higher 50 years ago, I bet. And finally, some sports specific to women show up.

And then the statistically irrelevant — those that couldn’t get even 1 percent, in this order: Women’s soccer, women’s pro basketball, women’s golf.

What makes it a bit sad/embarrassing for the sports at the bottom is this list is that “not sure” got 3 percent of the vote.

Interesting stuff. Football, king of the jungle. Baseball, perhaps too slow and not violent enough for modern Yanks. The NBA, still working on getting 10 percent of love. And men’s soccer, still struggling to get traction. Women’s sports, unloved, even by women.