It’s now officially less than a week until Football Armageddon, an LSU-Alabama extravaganza that only the Southeastern Conference could produce, a showdown — if it can be called a mere showdown — to not only re-invent the sport, but also to pretty much forever define the hype and pageantry and delicious excess of the college game.

So let’s establish some ground rules up front.

Let us please, before we go any further, eliminate any more references to the game as “grown men football.”

This ban would be extended to also exclude “big boy football” and “not for the meek,” as well as “putting on your big boy pants.”

We get it.

This is big all righty.

LSU-Alabama matters because the two are not only among the biggest and baddest and strongest, but even with all that bulk and attitude, are surely among the swiftest, which defines their conference.

We will allow “Game of the Century,” but only because it is still a fledgling century and the only regular season affair that might compare to it since the turn of the millennium happened in the Big Ten … and thus couldn’t have been all that danged-fired important to the fate of mankind.

No. 1 vs. No. 2, in the regular season. In ancient lore they were known as Poll Bowls, back when computers weren’t to be trusted and the polls really meant something besides BCS posturing.

The SEC has never actually had one in-house, at least not in the regular season, an oddity since it’s well known the conference invented college football.

The closest came with LSU involvement in 1959, when the No. 1 Tigers played No. 3 Ole Miss in one that lived up to the hype with defense and Billy Cannon and late-arriving, Hollywood-scripted fog on the bayou.

It would be no surprise if this one matched that defensive struggle, a reminder that defense still matters in this spread-offense age.

It was suggested it might end up meaning something in the summer, with Nov. 5 circled even way back then as a possible crucial juncture to overall scheme of this year’s universe.

But the hype is much bigger, it became the Game of this Century, because LSU and Alabama didn’t get to be No. 1 and No. 2 by happenstance or by the default of somebody else’s upset.

They were supposed to be good, while that started coming into focus almost from the start, it was only when the teams began not just beating, but systematically obliterating everything in their paths toward Nov. 5 that it became a must-see event beyond the SEC.

CBS moved heaven and earth and a few production trucks to negotiate its way into the prime time slot.

Part of the reason was the network needs a boost — its rating are down this year with its contract with the SEC.

Part of the reason is that CBS keeps putting Alabama or LSU in its prime slot, and neither have been leaving much to the imagination by halftime.

The scorched-earth approach, impressive as it is, doesn’t give casual viewers much reason to hang around for the second half’s commercials.

So even now there are scattered reports of four-figure ticket scalpings and at least one particularly good seat topping the $10,000 threshold.

That’s still for one seat for one game in one stadium, mind you.

Crazy, huh?

It also helps that it’s two teams that been playing each other since the invention of dirt.

Oh, and there’s that pesky Les Miles-Nick Saban thing, although a game of this magnitude rightly puts whatever personal rivalry still exists between those two opposite personalities on the back burner.

They are both now in full control of monster teams with no shadows hanging over them, no matter how they do it.

Not that we won’t see some interesting takes on the English language, with Saban avoiding it at all costs and Miles manhandling it, sometimes beyond recognition.

Miles, however, might slip up and admit that it’s a big game — the kind his guys absolutely love to play in — while Saban will surely go to great pains that remind the media that the Tide must still get up the same way next week for Mississippi State (and Georgia Southern the next).

Don’t expect much fireworks there.

But I’m predicting right now there will be two or three delightful Twitter incidents on both sides well before kickoff.

For that matter, LSU might want to suspend somebody, preferably nobody important this time, just to make sure the Tigers will have their proper edge on with another distraction to ignore.

At any rate, strap yourself in for a wild week.

Time for LSU and Alabama to go put on the big boy pants.

Oops.