Today marks the start of the NFL football season and for many fans around the country that means the start of fantasy football.

While I have the time before kickoff, I feel I should use this space to make an important public service announcement.

No one cares about your fantasy team.

No one.

Your friends don’t care. Your coworkers don’t care. Your significant other doesn’t care. Your pets just want more treats.

You’re boring them with the nitty gritty of a team that, outside of a computer, doesn’t actually exist.

Over the last decade, with the rise of the Internet, fantasy sports have taken off, spawning scores of offshoot enterprises and varieties of the popular rotisserie games.

The basis is simple. Act as an owner of an imaginary team, where you can pick any player in the league. Compile that team with the best statistical players and go head-to-head with other teams, earning points based on what happens in real games.

It first gained popularity in baseball, with the sport’s gaggle of statistics and constantly shifting rosters adding intrigue to a fan playing general manager. Play the best player or the hot player? The crafty veteran or the up-start rookie?

When the model was adapted to football, the game was an instant hit.

With fewer games, fewer roster changes and less time to get distracted, fantasy football attracts even the casual football fans, allowing them to get involved in nearly every game, every weekend rooting for their own personal team.

The game is fun, competitive and interactive. Playing fantasy sports introduces fans to players having great seasons hidden on rosters of teams that otherwise would be ignored. It highlights big games and causes fans to root for a rival, even against their better judgment.

Somewhere, between the wide-spread growth of the game and people taking it more seriously, the line between game and the sport got blurred. People started wagering money on the outcomes of seasons, eventually individual games, and the stakes got raised even more.

The stakes, whether real or imagined, have been raised so much, now it seems almost commonplace to share the details of every up and down your fantasy team makes.

When a player goes down, it’s shared. When another has a huge game, it’s shared. When another makes a costly error late in a game, it’s shared.

It’s shared not because it was significant to the game, or to the actual professional team it occurred to, it’s shared because people think others care about them enough to care about something they made up.

With the rise of social media, there’s a rise of people who care so much about that made up team, and want you to care about their made up team, that they will berate a player for a poor game. They’ll openly tell others about how much a great individual performance affected them.

What is lost on many, whether it’s the boasters or the mourners, the quizzical or the irate, is that it’s a game.

Like any other game, the wins and losses don’t matter to those not playing.

As a society, most of us don’t brag about winning at Clue. Winning your bridge league isn’t cause for an office memo. Small talk, sure, but very, very small.

Seek advice? That’s fine. Playful banter with an opponent? A given. Putting real things on the line? It’s your life.

It’s fine to discuss great individual performances and great to get involved in a sport, even through virtual means. Playing fantasy can make watching sports much more enjoyable.

But this season, as fantasy drafts wrap up and real games begin, remember that playing fantasy is just a game.

And no one cares if you won or lost.