Here at the tail end of the football season, most partisan football fans—and there are somewhere in the neighborhood of 400 million of us—have to make a choice we dread. Our teams have been eliminated. There are only a few teams left standing. For whom do we root?

The answer, of course, is “it depends.” For most fans, partisanship runs deep. When your team’s no longer in the hunt, you can decide not to watch–but only the most extreme partisans care about their team alone at the expense of seeing the season through, and ignoring the issue doesn’t make it go away. You can refuse to care–but that goes against human nature. Or you can suck it up and pick a side.

But this question of rooting interest is a thorny one. Fans have strange habits and prejudices that make choosing a side difficult. For example: I grew up in New Jersey as a New York Jets fan—which meant I was also an American Football League (AFL) fan. Today, I’m a Colts fan; I’ve lived in Indiana since 1976. (Ironically, Super Bowl III featured the Jets upsetting the then-Baltimore Colts 16-7–a win guaranteed by Joe Namath. The game proved parity between the upstart AFL and the NFL; in the off season, the leagues finally completely their merger. The AFL plus three teams–including the Colts–became the American Football Conference [AFC] and the old NFL teams became the National Football Conference [NFC].) So I’ve been rooting for AFL/AFC teams for almost 50 years. To add a layer of complication, Colts play in the AFC South Division.

Conference and division matter. You always want to feel as if your team plays in the better conference, and in that conference’s toughest division. You don’t want to hear accusations that you have a soft road to the Super Bowl. You want the toughest schedule. You want to play the best teams, with the best players.

But this makes it more difficult to choose sides after your team goes down. Last week, for example, I might have rooted for the Houston Texans in their game against the New England Patriots, since the Texans won the Colts’ AFC South Division. If the Texans won the Super Bowl, I could contend that the Colts play in football’s toughest division–a nice little status bump for my team.

But it would also mean rooting for an arch rival. The Colts have to play the Texans twice every year, and I hate losing to them. I have nightmares about the Texans’ offensive line cleaving the Colts defense like Moses parting the Red Sea, Arian Foster scampering through to the promised land. I do not like rooting for the Texans.

But I did–mostly because there’s no possible way I can root for the Patriots. The Patriots have been the Colts’ nemeses long before the Texans were a gleam in Bob McNair‘s eye. The Colts and Pats were AFC East rivals before the conferences expanded and rejiggered into four divisions instead of three in 2002, and the Bill Belichick/Tom Brady Patriots have been the most dominant team in the AFC for more than a decade.

I respect the Patriots, but I hate the Patriots. I love Peyton Manning, and Tom Brady has gotten the better of him too many times. I love the Colts, and the Patriots have broken Colts’ fans hearts too often for me to ever root for them. Ever.

This hatred–I know it’s a strong word, but there you go–prohibits you from rooting for a team, even if they represent your division or your conference. Not only that, you can’t root for a team if you’ve ever hated them over the course of your sports-watching lifetime, even if they’ve been terrible for years. I, for example, could never root for the Chicago Cubs or the St. Louis Cardinals or the New York Yankees; as a New York Mets fan, I despised them as a kid.

I don’t hate a lot of football teams the way I hate the Patriots. I’m not crazy about the Dolphins, because they, too, were a tough old AFC East rival. I hate the Cowboys; that “America’s Team” jazz has always been annoying. I strongly dislike the Washington Redskins, because I think their owner is a narcissistic boob. I kind of hate the Steelers, because I kind of hate Ben Roethlisberger.

And I kind of hate the Jacksonville Jaguars and the Tennessee Titans, the Colts’ other division rivals. Although the Colts dominated them during the Peyton Manning era, they were both good enough often enough that I never mind seeing them lose.

Anyway, this past weekend, it was easy. I could root for the Ravens to beat the Pats–even though I think the Ravens are sort of silly, with their goofy Ray Lewis dancing and their fans who still haven’t gotten over the Colts’ move to Indy, even though the Colts have now played more games in Indy than they ever played in Baltimore. That’s the key: I think they’re silly. I don’t hate the Ravens. I hate the Patriots.

The NFC game was easy, too. I don’t care a whit about either team. But San Francisco 49ers Coach Jim Harbaugh is an ex-Colts quarterback, and I like San Francisco–the city–better than Atlanta. So I rooted for the Niners.

And now that the Super Bowl is set–and both the teams I rooted for won–I have only one more decision to make. Will I root for the team with the ex-Colt coach and the city I like? Or the team that represents my conference and confers some, at least meager, bragging rights; after all, the Ravens had to go through the Colts to get to the championship game. Maybe the Colts would have been good enough to beat the Niners if they’d have beaten the Ravens in the first round. And the Ravens have an ex-Colts coach, too: their offensive coordinator is Jim Caldwell.

I dunno. It’s complicated.