FOXBORO — Like every kid who ever played flag football, Duron Harmon dreamed about playing in the Super Bowl. What he didn’t dream about was locating hotel rooms and bartering for tickets.

But when you get there — or if you’re smart, the week before you get there — that’s as much a part of the Super Bowl Experience as watching the Philadelphia Eagles offense on an endless loop of videotape.

The Super Bowl is a national holiday for everyone but the players and coaches involved. For them, it’s a balancing act. It’s the final work day of the year, but the two weeks leading up to the moment Harmon and his teammates will run onto the turf at U.S. Bank Stadium in Minneapolis can be a hectic collection of days of preparation and nights of learning what life is like for workers at TripAdvisor, Ace Ticket and Travelocity.com.

Fortunately, Harmon and many of his teammates are veterans of this hysteria before the hysteria. This will be his third trip to the Super Bowl in four years, so he knows the drill. Yet even for Harmon and his teammates, apportioning hotel rooms, tickets and handling other logistics for family and friends can be fraught with as much danger as sorting out how to handle Nick Foles or, in the case of the Patriots offensive line, coping with guys like Fletcher Cox, Brandon Graham and Nigel Bradham.

“Getting everything done as fast as possible I should say,” Harmon said of the approach he takes to the tasks before The Task. “Going through it the first time, I didn’t realize how fast everything comes up on you with tickets, hotel rooms, trying to get your families and your friends there and trying to make sure everybody is OK. So I would say just getting everything done, getting the hotel rooms situated before I even go out there so that when I get out there I can focus strictly on the Philadelphia Eagles.

“You try to use the days you have off to try to gather all the information you need for your families to make sure everything is situated. Then when you come in (for practice) it’s all business. It’s all getting prepared for the Eagles. This is the best team we’re going to play all year. I know we say it each and every week, but these are the only two teams left standing. It’s the best of the best, so we’re going to have to put everything we have into it.

“Can’t be worrying about the extra extravaganza stuff with the Super Bowl. You’ve got to kind of leave that to your families, leave that to your wives. Let them take care of that, you just focus on the only thing that matters and that’s winning the football game.”

Yet even finding time for that most essential of duties takes not only planning but an inordinate amount of focus that can — and has for some — become a distraction as difficult as your opponent. The first time the Patriots went to the Super Bowl under Bill Belichick in 2001, some of his veteran players were not happy. It wasn’t a problem with the game plan to thwart the heavily favored St. Louis Rams. It was that some rookies got far larger rooms in New Orleans than some veterans.

That might sound like a trivial distraction, but the real distractions are often in the details — or in the square footage of a room.

Belichick immediately understood no distraction was too trivial to ignore, especially after team captain Lawyer Milloy informed him during a walkthrough practice that he heard rookie Richard Seymour crowing about the vastness of his room while Milloy could barely fit his suitcases in his.

Belichick responded in his usual way saying, “Really, Lawyer?”

But when Milloy got back to the hotel, the concierge was waiting for him with a new key. Milloy later recalled he opened the door to a room that was “big as hell” and overlooked Bourbon Street. It had a Jacuzzi, room to wander and, in the corner, of all things a treadmill.

That night Belichick approached Milloy at dinner and asked if he liked his room. Milloy said he did but couldn’t understand why it had a treadmill in it.

“Because it was my room,” Belichick said as he walked away.

For the rest of the week, every time Belichick saw Milloy he’d ask, “How’s my room?”

The Patriots upset the heavily favored St. Louis Rams at the end of that week, 20-17. Did sleeping in Belichick’s room help?

“It didn’t hurt,” Milloy joked years later.

One cannot always count on his coach giving up his suite to avoid distractions, of course. After all, there’s only one head coach and well over 50 players to contend with plus their families. So what is the best way to handle the logistical problems of family and friends?

“Be prepared to say no,” says Matthew Slater, who is heading to his fourth Super Bowl in 10 years. “You have to tell people no unfortunately and then just remember we’re going down there for one reason. I know there’s going to be a lot of hoopla and what not, but our focus needs to be on the game, our preparation and going down there and playing our best game of the season.

“Everybody thinks we get free tickets. It can become a distraction if you let it linger. Obviously, there are a lot of people that have stood behind us as players that we want to have be a part of this experience with us, but at the same time we’re only going down there for one reason. This is work for us.”

Indeed so, and there are many ways to prepare for this job that do not directly involve the Eagles. The first is the personal logistics of family and friends, but there is another issue that veteran safety Devin McCourty believes is equally important this week. It is the imparting of a hard lesson he learned six years ago at Super Bowl XLVI. Although it was the first of his four trips to the NFL’s most important game, it remains the one seared in his memory.

“To win that AFC championship is huge,” McCourty cautioned. “You have fun, celebrate that, but you can’t forget that winning that game allows you the opportunity to play in the biggest game of the year and how you want to be prepared. You don’t want that confetti falling as you’re walking off the field and the other team is winning. It’s a terrible feeling. There’s no words you can say.”

None at that point, but in the days leading up to the biggest game of your life it seems there are a few words as important as “Philadelphia Eagles.” They’re “no,” “the tickets are all set” and, at least in Lawyer Milloy’s case, “What’s up with the treadmill?”