In August 1964 my father drove me from Youngstown, Ohio, to Ann Arbor for freshman orientation at the University of Michigan.

While there, he stopped at a campus ticket office and bought me a pair of season passes for the home games of the Michigan Wolverines football team. “You can invite a friend to go with you,” he said, handing me the packet. Then he hugged me and drove away.

I don’t know what he was thinking. I had never shown any interest in competitive sports and was unlikely to develop such an interest while at college. My grandmother, who had lived with us for several years after my mother’s death, was an enthusiastic tennis player but detested what she called “the blood sports”— football and ice hockey.

She told us that our high school didn’t have a football team because the superintendent’s son had died from a catastrophic football injury. Now I think the school was simply too small to support a team, and Grandma made up the story about the superintendent’s son to discourage my brothers from ever taking up one of the blood sports.

Actually, I do know what Dad was thinking when he gave me those season tickets. I was a studious kid, maybe excessively so, and he wanted me to have some fun in college. He was hoping I’d become a normal coed, the kind who wants to date boys and go to football games. He was an Ohio State alum and thought it would be enjoyable to kindle a sports rivalry between us, something to tease each other about when I called home.

It didn’t work. Accompanied by my roommate, I attended the first two games but understood nothing of what I saw. All I remember now is the walk to the stadium, the beauty of the fall foliage overhead, the crunch of fallen leaves underfoot, the crispness of the air. I sold the remaining tickets and used the money for concerts and theater performances.

A couple of years ago I told my friend Faith, another Ohio State alum and fervent Buckeyes fan, about my refusal to engage in football trash-talk with Dad. Her response was, “I feel genuinely sorry for your father. Sports rivalries are one of the joys of life.”

Great, I thought, yet another way I let Dad down. He died when I was in my mid-twenties, just a few months after I told him I was a lesbian and he told me he was worried that I wouldn’t have a means of financial support without a husband. If Dad had lived just a little bit longer, he’d have seen the technology boom that gave me a reasonably lucrative career in tech writing and editing. He would have stopped worrying about me, and perhaps I would have found it possible to learn enough about football to hold up my end of the conversation.

That last part is doubtful, for no matter how many times my spouse (a Seattle Seahawks fan) explains the rules of football to me, I can’t seem to keep them in my head. First and ten? Rushing? Pass completion? It’s all Greek to me.

When Sharon watches a game on television, she emits many blood-curdling screams, which I’ve learned to ignore. Occasionally she summons me to watch an instant replay, and I say, “Wow!” but really, I have no idea what just happened. The game still looks to me, as it did when I was a college freshman, like a bunch of big guys running at each other and trying to inflict bodily injury.

Being able to make small talk about football is sometimes a social advantage, however, and I’ve discovered a way to do it without having to witness the brutality of the game itself: I listen to Sharon’s post-game recap, and I read the sports page of the daily newspaper.

Some of those sports writers are damned good writers, and their articles contain a lot of information about the players’ lives and personalities. Football doesn’t interest me, but character development does, and there’s plenty of that in the player profiles.

Recently I had to replace my phone. The T-Mobile store was staffed exclusively by young men; the sound system pumped out loud, pounding rap music. The salesman who helped me was courteous and pleasant, but I could tell he was bored. While my new phone was charging, the salesman at the next desk asked him, “What did you think of the game yesterday?”

“I didn’t even watch it,” he replied. “I hate Tom Brady.”

“I’m with you on that,” I said. “What a jerk! But how about Geno Smith? I’m glad he’s finally getting to show what he can do.”

He looked surprised. “Are you a football fan?”

“Not really,” I said, “but my spouse is, and I read the sports page.”

“Well, you sure know what you’re talking about,” he said.

Dad, you would have been proud.

Alice Bloch is an author known for her short fiction, essays and memoirs, including “Mother-Daughter Banquet,” which earned her a Minerva Rising Press Memoir Award. She was the editor of the recently published collection “Life Lessons from the Seniors of Vashon,” culled from a series of interviews by journalist John McCoy, about the life stories of 130 island residents.