Dateline: SAN FRANCISCO

Two things you don’t expect to learn about Dan Marino are: one, he is painfully young; and two, he is fat.

Not that he’s a real porker, not like a pulling guard or a nose tackle, but he has a belly that belongs on a baker, or a bartender, not on the greatest quarterback to ever become a legend over a weekend, which is about how long it has taken Marino to make the world forget Dan Fouts.

Quarterbacks, especially record-setting 23-year-old quarterbacks, ought not to look better with their shirttails out. Marino has a body made for suspenders.

Bless his paunch, a mortal flaw. You cannot imagine what a relief it is to have made this discovery. For if he had one of those speedbump stomachs, he would be just too perfect to stand.

He already has hair that curls around his face with careless insolence, eyes as blue as a Florida dawn, a smile that could melt the heart of a hermit, and he can throw a football with the inspiration of a minor Roman deity, which he is rumored to be in assorted Italian neighborhoods and the offensive huddle of the Dolphins.

IF YOU STARTED out to build a quarterback, Marino would already have all the best parts, though yours would probably be able to touch his toes without sitting.

And you might give him something interesting to say, just for variety. Marino treats conversation like a spaniel treats a rose bush.

“How did you come by your fast release?” Marino is asked.

“Who can say?” he shrugs.

“What do you say to people who already call you the greatest quarterback who ever lived?” he is asked.

“Who’s to say who is the greatest?” he says.

“Are you surprised to be in the Super Bowl so soon in your career?” he is asked.

“No,” he says.

“Do you think you are a dull person?” he is asked.

“Who’s to say who is dull? Maybe I think you are dull,” he says.

AND SO IT GOES. Marino came to this Super Bowl with a world ready to anoint him for his achievements, past and future, and he has managed to treat it as if it were trying to steal his wallet.

He has been patient with almost all inquiries, but he would clearly rather be someplace else. Three minutes into any interview and he starts shuffling his feet as if his toes were on fire.

An easy conclusion to draw is that Marino is essentially a jerk, a judgment that is as premature as is any on his place in the history of paid quarterbacking.

Marino is not very smart, not in an extra-football sense. If he has ever had a thought that did not include football or fun or family, he chased it out of his head before it left a scar.

In order to get out on the town with his teammates this week, to avoid the fans who gather to gawk and tug at him, Marino has had to leave his Oakland hotel in disguise. What the disguise is has not been revealed, but rumor has it he has been undetected as a scholar.

“I don’t think about things,” Marino said. “Have I ever sat down and thought at this moment in my life if I am destined to be a champion? No, I don’t do things like that.”

A DEEP THINKER, HE ISN’T. Marino’s explanation of how he does what he does with the football is no more complicated than this: “I just turn it loose and have fun.”

One suspects if he were to ever really understand his gift, in the way that a mechanic understands an engine, the fun would be gone. For him and for us.

For now, Marino’s innocence, or his arrogance, whichever it is, produces simply marvelous results.

Marino lives by instinct, on the field as well as off it, an approach to life that has served him fairly well so far. Fame has always come to Marino on his terms, or not at all.

Marino has a specialness that visits a few humans without any basis in reason. Just as Edison was destined to be more than a tinkerer, Baryshnikov more than a dancer, Charles Manson more than a nuisance, so was Marino destined to be more than just another quarterback.

EVEN DON SHULA is not quite sure what makes Marino so special. “I’d rather just pat him on the back and say, ‘Atta boy, Dan’,” Shula has said.

And Marino is a baby still, reacting with a child’s suspicion to adults who have wronged him.

A magazine story during Marino’s junior year at Pitt quoted him as saying he could throw the ball better than anybody in college and could throw with anybody in the pros. Marino did not say it exactly that way, even if he believed it, and he has been careful since to avoid saying anything the least bit colorful.

“I’m just being myself,” he said. “I am not being purposely dull.”

No argument here. No one could be that dull on purpose.