“And now — ” This Sunday, the familiar words and the unmistakable song will launch the first episode of the last season of “The Sopranos.”

Appropriately titled “Made in America,” this episode marks the beginning of the end of the series, but it is also the end as beginning, grounding fate squarely in the characters’ childhood selves, rather than in the stars. (Isn’t that Dr. Melfi’s message?) We’re dunked, along with the Soprano family and crew, back into the pot in which all Americans are more or less melting. Ambition and hard work — ingredients in the Old Country recipe for New World success — have paid off for the Sopranos. Just look at the family’s McMansion, Carmela’s spec house, Meadow’s Ivy League education, A.J.’s private schools, and the luxury SUVs and other toys of affluent suburbia,

Of course, you can drown at the bottom of the pot as easily as you can bubble to the top, and it’s this sense of slippery peril that helps to explain our fascination with the Sopranos saga. There but for the accident of birth … as we live from paycheck to paycheck, maxing out our credit cards, we shake our heads at our outsize real estate jones, our grand dreams for our (spoiled) children, our own appetite for plasma screens and other technological marvels. But at least we don’t have to worry about getting killed after a nice osso buco with the mistress at Artie Bucco’s, because we don’t have mistresses, at least not the kind on hand at the Bada Bing, and the only knives we have to fear getting stuck in our backs are metaphorical. It’s that suck-up in the next cubicle we have to watch out for, not some hit man imported from the Old Country.

Besides, we tell ourselves, it’s not as if we watch this crazy family because we actually like them. We laugh at them — it’s a black comedy, right? — not with them. They’re usually outrageous, often exasperating, sometimes horrifying. Their behavior is frequently pitiable, if not contemptible. Not to mention illegal and immoral. There are no innocents in the morally blighted neighborhoods David Chase and his collaborators have so artfully constructed out of the real Garden State.

Tony in particular is not what we’d like to think of as a member in good standing of our community. He’s the head of a criminal organization that viciously trades in vice and ruthlessly exploits human weakness. His crew succeeds through bribery, blackmail, intimidation, and every variety of violence, from beating to maiming to murder. He has routinely sanctioned hits and has himself taken lives, in blood both cold and hot. He is a case study in sociopathy — grandiose, egocentric, lacking in impulse control (those cannoli, those cigars, those hookers, that temper!), manipulative, and duplicitous.

Yet if we believe the DSM, Tony doesn’t really qualify as a sociopath. He’s not amoral … not exactly. He does have a code of honor, though of course it’s the code of omertà. He is obsessed with respect, honor, and loyalty — though somehow they always manage to morph into disrespect, dishonor, and betrayal. When he smiles while stabbing you in the back, it’s with what poker players call a “tell” — a half-smile, a forced expression evident in his lips alone, not his eyes.

But, most of all, Tony is not lacking in affect, a key marker in the DSM. In fact, he’s all affect, a quivering mass of emotion. He may be king of the Jersey underworld, but he’s a bit of a drama queen. He feels everything deeply, too deeply. The mantle of leadership weighs heavily on his hulking frame; every season he seems to slump further. The nightmares and flashbacks have become more frequent and more intense. Hair tousled, his sleeveless undershirt twisted with sweat, he looks worse and worse upon being jolted awake. Each outrage Tony commits seems to add five pounds of guilty flesh to his prodigious gut. Near death after being shot last year, he’s lumbering back bigger than ever.

Indeed, as the years have passed, Tony has increasingly embodied the sin of gluttony. And, come to think of it, the other six as well. Avarice: That needs no elaboration. Anger: Just ask the hapless victims of his rage. Sloth: Undershirt, boxers, and an open bathrobe. Lust: The Bada Bing was built for that one. Envy: More is never enough.

And don’t forget the biggest sin of all: Pride. We all like to think of ourselves, in the words of the theme song, as the “chosen one … one in a million,” all the while fearing that we too were “born under a bad sign.” Like Tony, we think we’re the center of the universe — especially the world of our families. We want to make everything work out, only to see things go wrong. And it’s all our fault, we think; just like Tony, we agonize and suffer nightmares. Thank God it’s just television, and we don’t actually have life-or-death powers that can be exercised at our whim — though, in our darkest moments, we wish we did, and we fear that desire.

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So what will this final season bring us? Based on the two episodes that HBO has made available to the press, and without spoiling anything, I can tell you that this season will make up, spectacularly, for the relative disappointment of last year. Both the nuclear and the criminal families are back with — sorry — a bang. The shaky truce between the imprisoned Johnny Sack and Tony will get even shakier. Paulie’s thwarted desire for leadership (and a bigger cut) and Christopher’s ambition for a career in filmmaking will resurface. Will “Cleaver” (apologies to the Beaver) be a hit, or will it cause a hit? Fat Bobby, freed of his role of caring for Uncle Junior, will find a new, uncomfortable part to play, at Tony’s behest. And Silvio … hasn’t he always been just a little too loyal? Will he ever really speak his mind?

Both Meadow and A.J. have grown leaner and warier. Unexpected visitors will call on Tony during his groggy amble down the driveway in his bathrobe to pick up the Star-Ledger, and Meadow’s reaction may signal a turn that has been in the making for a while now. Will she be like Michael Corleone at the beginning or at the end of “The Godfather”? And could A.J., who started out like a pudgy version of Fredo, become more like Sonny? Or will his Hispanic girlfriend, the unmarried mother of a small child, take him down a different path? (“Least she’s a Catholic,” Tony said last year.) And that spec house — if it never sells, what will ensure Carmela’s loyalty? Is it true love or just willfulness that keeps that marriage together? Meanwhile, looming over everything and everyone is the ghost of Livia, never exorcised by Dr. Melfi.

When I watched the first two episodes with my wife, she had a reaction that says a lot about the strange hold this dysfunctional family and its twisted web of criminality have exercised on our collective imagination. “It’s a little lonely,” she said, watching the DVD. She missed the feeling that she was sharing the experience with tens of millions of other people across the country.

That’s a collective feeling mostly absent these days from episodic broadcast television, which has for a quarter-century been on a long, slow decline into an uncertain, though certainly smaller, future. So far, “The Sopranos” has been both the best that cable television has had to offer, as well as the promise of an ever more expansive future. For that we can be grateful to Mr. Chase, James Gandolfini, and the show’s talented crew. A quarter-century from now, when broadcast television is a dim memory, “The Sopranos” will be the highlight of the Golden Age of Cable, which by then will no doubt have been supplanted by some monster grandchild of YouTube. When the series started, eight years ago, Tony was musing about the fate of wayward ducks. Now he’s facing his own mortality and worrying about the future of his nuclear and criminal families. Prince Hamlet has become King Lear.

In words from an earlier Golden Age, good night, Tony, and good luck.

rasahina@nysun.com