The New England Immortals v. the New Jersey Scarecrows.
Or some such.
Well, there have been worse Super Bowls going in, I suppose, not that it mattered who the Patriots got to confirm their greatness against.
Only coronation is left, the anointing of the New England Patriots as the greatest team in the history of football and of Tom Brady as the greatest quarterback, mere trifles what with only those improbable New York Giants in the way.
The least the Patriots should have had to do was to beat the better Manning, and yet they get Eli the Lesser. They could have had Cowboys, if just for the quarterback girlfriend matchup, or best of all and what ended in overtime in subzero Green Bay, the last patrol of Brett Favre.
But, no, the Giants survived on the road again, under the weather again, ruining a perfectly good narrative and allowing the world to wallow in Patriot glory for the next two weeks, as if there are enough superlatives to last that long.
Again and again is proved the old reflection of F. Scott Fitzgerald that there are no second acts in American lives.
That’s what we might have gotten with Favre, if his own and old nemesis, the refusal to believe that he can not throw a football through the eye of a needle, had not gotten him in overtime.
Against the Broncos, we recall, he threw a touchdown pass in overtime. Against the Giants, a careless interception.
Where we are now in the acts of Brett Favre’s life is surely somewhere beyond two, or even three, while Tom Brady is still in a very long first act, greater than Favre already, with the same dignity and appeal at the end yet to be managed.
And of all the possible finishes for a season kissing up to history, when someone had to take the last licks from New England, none could have been more intriguing that Favre and Brady at the end.
Not to take the clunky, ugly, freezer football of Sunday in both Green Bay and New England as an indication of anything other than survival of the thermally fitted, the NFL is the one sport that inevitably comes in from the cold, this time in suburban Arizona for Super Bowl XLII.
Things would have turned out as they did in the tropics or indoors, the Patriots outlasting an injured San Diego team and the Giants riding some kind of serendipitous joy wagon, clearly the least likely Super Bowl finalist since the Chris Chandler Flacons, whipping the Packers in their own ice box.
This was going to be Favre’s Super Bowl, not necessarily in victory but in tribute, the clear, dominating story line until Brady and the Patriots confirm the first 19-0 season.
We were ready to admire a career of courage and distinction and presence, and then when it came to a final defeat, a warm round of applause for the perfect warrior.
When all that history is made by New England, when the greatest single season standard in sports is set, there will be only a sense of conclusion rather than great achievement, a begrudging acceptance that Bill Belichick is every bit as great a coach as his more likeable predecessors.
Yet, the sentiment that would so naturally have flowed to Favre does not drift automatically to Brady, and certainly it will not be wasted on Manning either.
This will be a Super Bowl not of uncertainty nor disbelief but of filling in the blanks, dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s as the Patriots confirm the obvious.
What risk there is for New England is that, though they are already the only team to go 18-0, if they do not go 19-0 they will be immortal frauds, the greatest case of false advertising since the free lunch.
Not often does the Super Bowl match quarterbacks who are in the discussion of greatest ever, and that was what was lost when the Giants refused to do the right thing.
Favre against Brady would have been the best matchup since Elway against Joe Montana, at least the equal of Bart Starr and Len Dawson who were in the very first one or when Roger Staubach met Terry Bradshaw.
In fact, Favre lost to Elway when the sympathies were the opposite, Elway then as the well used Favre and Favre as the in-his-prime Brady.
The usual Super Bowl quarterback intrigue is wrung out of a Brad Johnson against a Rich Gannon or a Trent Dilfer against a Kerry Collins.
Brady has matched his Super Bowls against Kurt Warner, Jake Delhomme and Donovan McNabb, and for his most significant one he deserved better than the little brother of the other Manning.
Favre won his Super Bowl over Drew Bledsoe, the predecessor of Brady, and how moving that might have been if Favre could have bookended a career over man and boy.
We sigh for what might have been.