After a brief 23-year absence writing a regular column, I’m back. and I’m upset.

I watched the Super Bowl Sunday night. Every minute of it, from stem to stern.

I’m not upset because of the results. I’m not a Chiefs fan. I’m not an Eagles fan. In fact, I don’t like football at all. I’m the one man in Lowndes County who doesn’t like football, apparently. Growing up, I went to a small private school that didn’t have a football team. Basketball was the game of choice.

So, if I don’t like football, why was I upset about the Super Bowl?

Simple. They only showed Halle Bailey’s face for about one-third of a second when I was expecting much more.

For context: Anyone who has known me for more than five seconds can tell you that “The Little Mermaid” — Walt Disney Pictures’ 1989 animated feature — is my favorite movie ever. Period. End of sentence.

It’s more than a favorite movie; for me, it’s become a hobby. I have met members of the movie’s voice cast. I have a small collection of original production art from the film. I’ve flown to Europe in search of “Little Mermaid” collectible merchandise not available in the U.S.

I have been an animation fan all my life and “The Little Mermaid” was a major return to form for Disney animation after decades of neglect following Walt Disney’s death in 1966.

So it was with a skeptic’s view that I took in the 2019 announcement that Disney was creating a live-action remake of my favorite movie, due out in May 2023.

Was this just a cash grab to squeeze extra bucks out of a popular, established character, said the cynic within me. The answer? Well, yeah. I don’t know of any company that deliberately sets out to lose money on a project.

The release of a teaser trailer for the film several months ago did much to calm my fears. It looked good, and actress Halle Bailey sounded excellent singing as Ariel the mermaid, so I decided to give this new film a chance.

Which is why I was watching the Super Bowl. Several entertainment websites had promised that Disney would be showing a more extensive trailer during that clash.

Except they didn’t.

Oh, there were trailers (or ads for online trailers) for quite a few movies. A new Ant-Man flick. A new Indiana Jones movie. “The Flash” was there. But not “The Little Mermaid.” The closest we came on that point was a commercial by Disney that had a rapid-fire collage of shots from various movies from the Mouse House, including a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shot of Miss Bailey as Ariel.

Curse, you, Internet!

You get my hopes up and then shoot them down like “Made in China” balloons over the Great Lakes! You raise my expectations, then explode them like the Goodyear blimp in “Black Sunday!”

Everyone knows that everything you read on the Internet is absolutely true. So why, oh why, World Wide Web, did you lie to me about that movie trailer? The Super Bowl was three hours of my life that I’ll never get back!

I imagine myself like the Cigarette Smoking Man from “The X-Files,” sitting menacingly in shadow at the far end of a conference table, twiddling my thumbs like Don Vito Corleone and quietly muttering to my lackeys “I shall have my revenge.”

Legions of my worldwide network of ninja warriors and flying monkeys descend upon Internet backbone locations, shredding servers, slicing fiber cables and loosing havoc upon the digital world that betrayed me. The fire-breathing dragons are held in reserve to deal the final, crippling blow, leaving major Tier I Internet service providers quaking in their boots.

Then, as the Earth reels and groans under the smoking wreckage of an Internet unable to process their sports bets or view the Netflix shows they borrowed their brother-in-law’s password to watch so they didn’t have to pay themselves … I will stand atop a pile of flaming mass storage devices, the Vince Lombardi Trophy in one hand, the 2008 Blu-Ray Platinum Edition of “The Little Mermaid” in 3D in the other, throwing my head back and laughing maniacally.

In reality, I’ll just be grumpy for a while, then head home and watch “Gunsmoke” on Pluto TV.