FOXBOROUGH, Mass. – As part of my ongoing quest to sniff out conspiratorial connections between the adult entertainment industry and other segments of society, I’ve traveled deep behind enemy lines into what the football cognoscenti call “Patriots Nation,” home of championship rings, deflated footballs and the occasional homicidal tight end.

Armed with nothing more than several well-placed anonymous sources, an enormous supply of Cool Ranch Doritos and countless hours of footage pilfered from the archives of NFL Films, I believe I have cracked the Football-Porn Code — which is a lot like the Da Vinci Code, only somewhat less likely to be made into a movie starring Tom Hanks.

My first clue came not from reviewing on-field action, but in observing scenes shot on the sidelines. Over and over, I witnessed the same pairing of seemingly spontaneous but suspiciously similar expressions: Men jutting a single finger in the air and loudly proclaiming “We’re number one” while other men mugged for the camera and said “Hi mom.”

Do you see it, people? Once you do, you will never be able to un-see it.

Just in case it’s not clear, I’ll spell it out in full: We’re number one plus Hi mom clearly adds up to some manner of depraved golden shower/incest thing all these football players are into.

That’s right: The same men your sons idolize and your daughters want to hook up with for a night of what appears at the time to be meaningless sex, but later results in an ill-fated bastard love child who will someday (at best) be drafted in the seventh round by the Jacksonville Jaguars, routinely gather on the sidelines to collectively celebrate the fantasy of urinating on their own mothers.

Shocking, right? There’s more.

Watch any professional football game and you’ll see fat men wearing visors giving bizarre hand signals to players on the field. Next to these men, you’ll see one of the team’s forgotten backup quarterbacks holding a clipboard. What you can’t see, because the networks that broadcast football games are in on this whole sordid conspiracy, is the contents of the paper secured to the clipboard.

As a fan of the game, you might reasonably assume these sideline clipboards hold playbook information, or a chart of defensive formations, or maybe offensive options categorized by down and distance. According to my sideline sources, however, what’s really depicted on these charts are sexual position diagrams drawn from the Kama Sutra and explicit descriptions published in old copies of Penthouse Forum.

This is why at the end of virtually every football play we see a pile of men with their limbs intertwined, still groping at each other long after the referee has blown his whistle. Those fat men wearing visors aren’t assistant coaches or offensive coordinators. They’re directors and producers.

While it might appear the defensemen in those piles are trying to take the ball from the opposing team’s player, what they’re really doing is tugging at his junk while the guys from NFL Films shoot it all for the organization’s secret gay porn project, a clandestine erotic effort that goes all the way back to the days of the original football/porn stud, Jim Thorpe, a man evidently better known to his teammates and co-stars as “Jerkin’ Jimbo.”

Once you think about it, it becomes painfully clear the NFL has been effectively mocking its viewers for decades, presenting football as a manly, macho athletic pursuit, even as they used hallowed gridirons across the country to form the biggest gay porn set in the history of man (with the possible exception of the Colosseum in Rome).

Just think of some of the ludicrous performer names the NFL has successfully passed-off as real over the years, like “Dick Butkus” and “Brian Griese” just to name a couple. Hell, for a while there, two men purportedly named “Brian Cox” and “Aubrey Beavers” were not only on the same team, they played the same position.

As embarrassing as it is to realize I used to hear phrases like “great penetration on the sack by cocks and beavers” and think nothing of it, like it was the most natural thing in the world for some milquetoast announcer chump like Jim Nantz to suddenly sound like he was narrating the action of Double-Penetrated Dolphins Vol. 7, I’m more outraged than humiliated at this point.

It’s not the porn production aspect that has me so angry, or even the fact the only NFL porn performing role available to short Italian men these days is the lowly placekicker character. No, what gets me most is the sheer dishonesty of it all.

Far from being the unscripted display of athleticism it purports to be, hardly a meritocracy in which players are paid strictly based on their achievements and productivity, this pernicious form of reality television is barely a step above Real Plumbers of Lucas County or Marriage Bootcamp: Iron Chef Edition.

Believe me, I take no pleasure in revealing the truth behind why professional football players wear such tight pants. As a lifelong fan of the game, this is much worse than finding out Milli Vanilli lip-synched the Scar-Spackled Bannister at the Ballpark Franks World Super Series Cup XXV in 1991, and far more wrenching than finding out last year Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny are the same woman.

Still, the truth must be told, no matter how painful and no matter how much it might undermine a cherished American institution. To pretend I haven’t seen behind the curtain, to live in denial and act as though I didn’t just decipher the most closely-guarded code since Colonel Sanders’ secret blend of 12 herbs and spices would be to do a massive disservice to porn and sports fans everywhere.

Thankfully, there’s still reason for optimism, and still cause to believe in the sanctity, integrity and veracity of American athletics: We still have the WWE and all its most famous stars.