Question: How do you know the guy next to you has a fantasy football team?

Answer: Wait 30 seconds and he’ll tell you.

Which brings us to today’s discourse.

I don’t care about your fantasy football team. No, really. I hope it loses. Perpetually. If the idea of telling me about your fantasy football team suddenly flies in your direction, try to duck. Because I’d love to send Lizzie Borden after you.

I hate to use the word hate. So let’s leave it here: I have a flaming dislike for fantasy sports that stretches to the moon and back. I find them inane, not to mention a serial offender of exacerbating the biggest pox on all of our houses: more self-indulgence.

I mean, I remember when sports was about rooting for your team. You know. The innocence of rooting for laundry. Or your alma mater. Enduring the pain, like going 90 years without a championship, to revel in the joy: finally winning because of a gag job by your arch rival.

That’s not enough anymore for the generation too busy to watch television. Now you get to root for a contrivance, thereby sending the allure of sports — living and dying with your real team — into a crossing pattern with fantasy. And worse, mistaking many of us as people who actually care.

Still, fantasy football felt a duller ache until this season. It’s getting to where I’d rather endure a transatlantic flight seated next to Curt Schilling than watch the National Football League, whose games now seem to get in the way of ads for DraftKings and FanDuel. It’s already beyond incessant. And a complete fraud.

Seriously. It’s not just gambling. It’s a blatant form. And yet it gets to walk between the raindrops. While the rest of us, who used to enjoy a wager or two on a football game, are victimized by selective prosecution.

Now I’m the last guy who ever relies on politicians to solve anything harder changing a light bulb. But we may have hope.

Attorney Steve Silver, a former sportswriter for the Las Vegas Sun who founded the web site TheLegalBlitz.com, wrote a most entertaining essay earlier this month on the fraudulence of daily fantasy sports. He quoted U.S. Congressman Frank Pallone Jr. of New Jersey, the ranking member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which has jurisdiction over energy, environment, health care, telecommunications and commerce. Silver wrote that Pallone recently requested the committee hold a hearing to “review the legal status of daily fantasy sports.”

“Anyone who watched a game (has been) inundated by commercials for fantasy sports websites," Pallone said in Silver’s essay. “These sites are enormously popular, arguably central to the fans’ experience, and professional leagues are seeing the enormous profits as a result. Despite how mainstream these sites have become, the legal landscape governing these activities remains murky and should be reviewed.”

Silver noted that Pallone is a “huge supporter of legalized sports betting,” which only makes him presidential material. Still, Silver wrote, fantasy sports exist “in a carve-out of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA), exempt from the federal ban of Internet gambling so long as the games meet a few criteria.”

One of which is this: “All winning outcomes reflect the relative knowledge and skill of the participants and are determined predominantly by accumulated statistical results of the performance of individuals (athletes in the case of sports events) in multiple real-world sporting or other events.”

So let’s see if we have this straight: Success at fantasy sports is based on more skill than winning a sports bet? Why, because a few no-life stat geeks plug in their statistical formulas and lose just as much as the rest of the cattle?

If you think fantasy sports require more skill than winning a sports bet, you’ve never won a sports bet.

“We should have a system where people are free to use their money to play poker, bet on sports, and play fantasy as they see fit,” Silver wrote. “However, the more DraftKings and FanDuel inundate all forms of media with their ‘deposit $5, win millions’ ads, the more unwanted attention they will draw.

“So please, stop the commercials. We get it,” Silver wrote. “You figured out how to toe the line between unlawful sports betting and lawful paid fantasy sports. But if I see that idiot Patriots fan win $1 million again I’m throwing a deflated football through the TV.”

This is the opinion of Day sports columnist Mike DiMauro.

Twitter: @BCgenius