I was watching J. Lo and Ben Affleck watching the Red Sox-Angels game on Sunday (me on ESPN, they from the expensive seats behind the Sox dugout, or seats that would have been expensive, had they not been freebies), and all I could think was this: She must be stopped.

And not just from wearing fur-trimmed sweatshirts.

By sitting by her man for the entire game, and looking, if not enthralled, at least interested - feeding him nacho chips smothered in cheese, no less - she's making the rest of us look bad.

Or, as a friend married to a major Sox fan put it, ``@#$%& her!''

Why the hostility? Well, for the past few years my friend's been working toward never watching another game with her husband, and felt she had just gotten to a point where he was OK with that, when J. Lo goes and sits on her famous booty for hours on end.

What does this say about her relationship with Ben? I'm not sure what it means about their prospects for a long and happy marriage, but we do know that at the moment, she is in the first of the famous Five Stages of Watching Sports with your S.O.

1.) You go to the game, and not only pretend to be interested, but are interested.

2.) You're bored, but you conceal your feelings.

3.) You make cell phone calls from your seat.

4.) You agree to go, but pull out at the last minute due to an ``emergency.''

5.) You don't go, offer no excuse, and don't listen to the post-game wrap-up your S.O. is trying to share.

I don't know if you saw Sunday's game, but it was a real nail-biter - and not because it went into extra innings. In the ninth, J. Lo got up and appeared - could it be true? - to be leaving. Alone. (Well, not alone, alone. Her entourage had gotten up to leave also. But alone without Ben.)

As the ESPN announcers turned their attention from the game to J. Lo's departure, a cheer went up in living rooms all around Boston.

Finally!

The only question was, Why? There were lots of theories. They ranged from the disappointing (bathroom break) to the delicious (sick of Ben). I thought perhaps it was a PR stunt, designed to create the perception of tension between the couple, thereby drumming up business for their two upcoming movies.

But whatever the reason, J. Lo was gone. And at that point, my friend married to the Sox fan felt she could rightfully retire herself, and started to get ready for bed.

But then, almost as if it were a horror flick, J. Lo returned. ``It was like when you think the monster is dead and you let down your guard and relax, and the hand shoots out of the lake,'' she recalled.

So now, not only had J. Lo already sat through nine innings (which is even longer than it sounds, when you consider that most people in L.A. leave in the seventh to avoid the traffic) but she was settling in for extra innings, too.

And then, as if to really rub it in, to show how closely she was following the action, how much she cared, after David Ortiz homered in the 14th, she gave him one of those ``You the man'' points.

(Catherine Zeta-Jones pulled a similar stunt at the Oscars last month when, eight months pregnant, she managed to sing, dance and basically look gorgeous. ``Here I am,'' a woman who's six months pregnant told me, ``complaining that I can't come to work, where I sit at a desk, and she's up there belting it out and not even getting breathless.'')

But back to J. Lo. As Sunday's game fades into the history books, the big question for us non-Sox fans is: Why did she stay? Ruling out a love of the game - a literature search turned up no stories about J. Lo and baseball - we can only conclude that she did it because as of yet, no wedding date has been set.