Ever since Taylor Swift appeared last September at a Kansas City football stadium, with a Chiefs jacket artfully shrugged off her shoulders, large swaths of the nation (I know, not you) have quietly or loudly lost their minds.

Here was the fulfilling of the prophecy foretold in “You Belong With Me,” in which Swift was, in fact, on the bleachers, and this time the guy finally realized he did belong with her. Here was the merger of two major fandoms. Here was Megyn Kelly giving her two cents on the couple, and Donald Trump giving his, and Howard Stern proclaiming that Travis Kelce should marry Swift, and my old friend, a literal ordained priest, texting me to say, “If 20 years of listening to the ups and downs of Taylor Swift’s love life ends with her marrying a football player, I am going to be so p—ed.”

By last week, relationship analysis had reached the truly upside-down place, with the launching of an outlandish theory on the right that the entire Traylor romance was part of a plot to win the 2024 election for President Biden.

There is clearly something going on here that has touched a nerve.

Now that Taylor has won her 13th and 14th Grammy, and now that the Japanese embassy has sent out a formal press release assuring that she can make it back from her Tokyo concert in time to watch her boyfriend play in the Super Bowl, maybe we can figure out what it was.