I would rather do almost anything than watch football, including think about AIG. So, herewith:

The Times featured a good spread on the agreements between insurer AIG and investment firm Goldman Sachs that led to AIG’s September 2008 downfall and the biggest Washington bailout in history.

Through private deals — that is, financial instruments not traded on any exchange or other proper market — AIG and Goldman decided starting in 2003 that if tens of billions of dollars’ worth of mortgage-backed and related securities went south, AIG would pay Goldman in cash. Furthermore, the two parties decided that if AIG ever suffered a ratings downgrade, the insurer would have to pony up some cash, anyway.

Two takeaways:

Takeaway one. Goldman either made one very savvy bet and one very bad bet, or two very savvy bets, depending on your level of cynicism.

The less cynical view: Goldman bet that the mortgage market would tank — and it also bet that when the mortgage market did tank, AIG would be able to make good on its promises. Goldman was right — and wrong. If O. Henry had ever written a short story about credit-default swaps, it would look something like this version.

The more cynical view: Goldman bet that the mortgage market would tank. And the investment firm bet further that when AIG wouldn’t be able to make good on its promises, the U.S. government, fearful that AIG’s failure would create a Depression, would step in and guarantee AIG’s obligations, including the billions of dollars it owed to Goldman.

Takeaway two. Takeaway number one doesn’t matter, because the whole situation never should have happened, anyway. The only reason that private agreements between Goldman and AIG were able to take the world’s economy hostage was that the trades went ungoverned by prudent, consistent rules meant to protect the economy from inevitable financial excesses.

Consider: AIG was able to make tens of billions of dollars’ worth of potential promises — a form of borrowing — with no consistent cash down upfront. No properly governed securities markets would allow such a thing.

If AIG had had to put, say, 10 percent down at the outset, and to do its deals on an independent, transparent exchange rather than through murky private agreements, the insurer likely never would have made such reckless speculations. Someone in the AIG executive office would have said to the folks devising the deals, “hey, what are you doing with all of our cash?”

And even if AIG had decided to go ahead, the central exchange on which it consummated its trades would have had AIG’s original deposit, along with similar deposits from a multitude of other investors, to cover some of AIG’s potential losses if markets turned against the company. Global investors, too, would have known exactly where the residual risk lay — at the exchange, not, potentially, at dozens of investment banks — thus obviating the mass-scale panic and the bailout.

The whole discussion around AIG — and it’s been going on nearly 18 months now — is thus somewhat surreal. It’s akin to accident investigators saying, gee, the guys were driving with no licenses, blindfolds on, and no steering wheels, and managed to crash into each other. How could we avoid such a situation in the future?

Hmmm . . .

— Nicole Gelinas, contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, is author of After the Fall: Saving Capitalism from Wall Street — and Washington.