We all live in the Bay Area, which we can all agree is a spectacular place to follow and play sports. Right? Anyone object to that statement? Of course not! There are so many teams here! Many of them win! The ones who lose have great club seating! We are awesome! A great sports region!

But here’s one odd piece of that unanimous affirmation:

For being so awesome and great, we have so few awesome and great regional sports traditions.

Amazingly few, in fact. That could be because we’re so focused on inventing stuff for tomorrow. Or it could be the fact that so many people have moved here from other places and cling to the traditions of their native tribes back home. Visit a sports bar around here on a Saturday and Sunday to see what I mean.

That is why, with the Stanford-Cal football interface coming up Saturday afternoon in Berkeley, it behooves me to proclaim that the Big Game is something that matters. It matters even to those who don’t realize it matters and/or ignore the game entirely.

In our culture, we need traditions. Otherwise, we have nothing on which to ground us, nothing to create a base for all the other stuff we experience. It’s the old and venerable that puts the latest cool thing — which I guess in sports would be, what, the Bellator MMA matches in San Jose this weekend? — into perspective.

The Big Game is the oldest and best sports tradition around here. Saturday will be the 119th time that Stanford and Cal line up against each other on the vaunted gridiron, a matchup that first took place in 1892.

For reference purposes, that was even before Tom Brady was playing quarterback for the New England Patriots.

Particularly in professional sports today, local and otherwise, the games and events are often giant Hostess Twinkies of marketing goo that are wrapped around a very tiny filling of actual athletic competition. The Big Game isn’t like that. The Stanford band is not marketing goo. It’s a living organism of often-indecipherable inside jokes and crass stupidity that grew spontaneously out of a student brainstorm in 1963. It also won’t be a working band at all on Saturday. The school has banned the band from making trips, even across the Bay, because of past obnoxious behavior. Unfortunately, this rule cannot apply to Justin Bieber or Roger Goodell.

The Axe, presented to the winner of Saturday’s game, was also not a calculated commercial branding exercise. It originated in 1899 when Stanford students thought it would be funny to taunt Cal students at a baseball game by using a lumberman’s axe that someone found on campus to decapitate a straw man dressed in blue and gold. The Cal students were peeved and stole the axe. It has gone back and forth since, now depending on who wins in football. Can’t you see a Madison Avenue exec today trying to float a “decapitated straw man” concept in a sponsorship meeting? Right. You can’t.

It’s absolutely true that to thousands and thousands of Bay Area sports fans, the Big Game is just background music, faded in glory from the early 20th century before the 49ers or Giants or Warriors, when Northern California were obsessed with the event. There are even reports that Memorial Stadium will have hundreds of empty seats Saturday. However, Stanford coach David Shaw made a good point this week.

That happened when I asked Shaw why he thought the Big Game was still significant to the greater Bay Area, even to people with no connections to the two schools.

“As we all know, in the Bay Area, there’s so many things going on,” Shaw said. “Right? There’s always million things going on. But what can’t ever be under-emphasized is, the fact that still in this country right now, football is No. 1. And in this area in particular, you’ve got the two highest academic institutions playing the top sport in the nation. … Some people don’t pay a lot of attention to football but they know when it’s Big Game week. Maybe the person they work for went to Stanford or one of their co-workers went to Cal. The banners come out and the coffee mugs come out. ‘We’ve got you guys this week. I hear the game’s at 2:30.’ Those conversations kind of start to happen. And people notice.”

He’s right. Not every Bay Area resident sees the Golden Gate Bridge — or the Moffett Field blimp hangars, or the Port of Oakland cranes — each and every day of his or her life. But we all know they are there. And on days we don’t see them, we are glad they exist because they form a framework for our geographic sense of place, for what makes us unique and allows us to feel … well, more Bay Area-ish.

That’s the exact role played by the Big Game in our sports landscape. The same goes for our other sports traditions, such as the Dipsea Race in Marin County. Or the Warriors’ “The City” jerseys. Or the California Derby horse race. Or more recent traditions, such as the kayakers in McCovey Cove or the Raiders’ unique pregame tailgate tribe in Oakland. And of course, there is the one Bay Area sports tradition that binds us all: Hating teams from Los Angeles.

Call me an old-fashioned sap. But I will bask in all elements of Big Game-ness on Saturday, even though I attended neither school. Keller Chryst, the Stanford quarterback, will be starting for the first time against Cal but remembers two years ago when, as a redshirt first-year player, he stood on the sideline at Berkeley as Cardinal quarterback Kevin Hogan was heckled mercilessly by Cal students and other Bear social commenters. Chryst knows it will be that way again this time, just as it has for 118 other Stanford starting quarterbacks before him. Isn’t that cool to realize? Yes, it is.

“I’ll be ready,” Chryst said. “We’ll stay within the game and try to block that stuff out.”

He didn’t ask. But my advice is to Chryst is to not block it out. Instead, he should wallow in it. Stanford’s trombone players would kill to be wallowing Saturday. Only in the Bay Area could someone write that sentence. This is what makes us all so sports awesome. Whether you realize it or not.