The level of self-absorption it has taken on all sides to turn 11 under-inflated footballs into a federal case seems to know no bounds. This was proven once again this week when Tom Brady and the NFL Players Association doubled down and hired high-powered attorney Ted Olson to pursue an appeal of the Second Circuit Federal Appeals Court ruling that reinstated Brady’s four-game suspension.

Olson was on the winning side in the Bush vs. Gore Supreme Court case that settled the 2000 Presidential election and on the losing side when he argued for a mistrial for spy Jonathan Pollard, who was found guilty of selling government secrets to Israel. His hiring in this matter then continues to raise the stakes in what long ago became an absurdity.

There are hundreds of thousands of children who go to bed each night with their bellies empty. There are inner-city schools in sad disrepair. There are homeless in every city in America wandering lost and alone. There are injustices that continue to go unchecked and ignored by guys like Olson and his counterpart on the NFL’s side, noted appeals court attorney Paul Clement. In the past 15 months we’ve all spent far less time thinking about those problems than we have about Deflategate. Shame on them and shame on us.

Now they will square off as Brady seeks to convince the Second Circuit that the best use of its 13 judges’ time is to rule on whether or not NFL commissioner Roger Goodell has the right to suspend a player he believes was part of a conspiracy to lighten his load by lightening a few footballs. If it is, Lord help the Republic.

Olson has argued 62 cases in front of the Supreme Court. One assumes all were more important than this dispute between an arrogant commissioner and a stubborn player, both of whom long ago lost any sense of how unimportant they and their game really are in the grand scheme of things.

We all love football. It is one of the greatest Sunday afternoon diversions ever invented. It’s also a hell of a business for the owners and the commissioner, who earns far more than any of the stars that make the NFL an obsession for many. It ain’t bad for the players either, who are well paid in the short term to risk long-term injury for our amusement.

What they all do, however, is not important. At least not as important as the guardian of “The Shield’’ and his nemesis of the moment seem to think.

Goodell’s draconian punishment of Brady was unfair but the players long ago handed that kind of Judge Roy Bean power to the commissioner and kept reaffirming it for the past 40 years. In matters like this, the commissioner is a hanging judge with NFLPA approval and its players like Brady who gave him the noose.

Such a system is unnerving but it’s clearly allowable under labor law. More importantly, it isn’t all that important. Certainly not as important as Brady and Goodell think.

Our obsession with all things Deflategate has served to reinforce the impression football is not a weekend diversion but something so important the same court that ruled on Brown v. Board of Education that ended public school segregation; Gideon v. Wainwright, that provided counsel for indigent defendants in serious legal cases; Roe v. Wade which settled the abortion question; and N.Y. Times vs. United States, which allowed publication of the Pentagon Papers that revealed the sad truth of our debacle in Vietnam now must speak on the pressing matter of whether the Ideal Gas Law supersedes labor law. Is this really a matter the Supreme Court needs to speak about?

I heard someone on the radio suggest last week that if the suspension stands, Brady should retire because that would show ’em. Show ’em what?

Guess what people, if he did, they’d still play the games, the same amount of people would watch and only your team would suffer. Are you nuts?

Millions upon millions of dollars have been spent on the issue of how air escaped from those footballs. Phones have been destroyed, men have lost their jobs and fans have lost their minds. Now Brady and the union have brought on Olson, who has prevailed in 75 percent of the cases he tried in front of the Supreme Court, to see if he can convince the Court of Appeals its full lineup of 13 judges has nothing more important to consider than The Strange Case of the Leaky Balls.

If Rod Serling were still around this would make a wonderful “Twilight Zone’’ episode, a nation’s legal system trapped inside a leather spheroid unable to figure out how to stop it from deflating.

In the grand scope of world events whether Tom Brady misses four games or doesn’t is unimportant. It won’t change much for his team and it won’t change anything about how he is perceived. He was the greatest quarterback of his generation before and remains so. No court, no commissioner and no silly suspension will change that.

There is something troubling about the fact such a trivial matter has consumed so much time and money. At a time when it’s a pitched battle to convince businessmen to raise the minimum wage to 15 measly dollars an hour, a league, a union and a millionaire player have wasted millions because everyone in the NFL is sure there’s nothing more important on Earth than what happens on fall Sundays.

In case you’ve all forgotten, it’s a game, folks. It’s not life and death. It’s not critical to the economy, the education and protection of our children or anything that threatens our way of life.

Deflategate is not a federal case, even though it became one.