A sure thing? Brady is as close as it gets: there is absolutely, positively no way the Eagles can win ... I think.

It's possible the Eagles will score. They're good. They're in the Super Bowl. It's possible Donovan McNabb will get the ball to gimpy Terrell Owens. It's possible the Eagles can win. They're one of two teams that could win. I learned my lesson in 1983 when I said Jim Valvano's N.C. State basketball team had no chance to beat Houston in the national championship game. All things are possible. Trees can tap dance, elephants can drive at Indy, and John Madden can rip a towel off Nicollette Sheridan. The Eagles can win. The Patriots will win, 24-0.

Pundits chained to typing machines then will furrow their delicate brows while measuring the immeasurable: Who's the best? These Patriots or the Cowboys of a decade ago? What about the Montana 49ers? Pittsburgh's Steel Curtain? Do we put Bill Belichick in a sentence with Vince Lombardi, the Patriots in a paragraph with the hallowed Packers?

But wait. We shouldn't get ahead of events. Anything is possible. The second half of that basketball game, Houston coach Guy Lewis ordered his Phi Slamma Jamma runners and dunkers to walk. Lewis must have slept through the first half and woke up thinking he was Dean Smith. Now, maybe Belichick will experience a similar brain seizure. Maybe he'll channel Amos Alonzo Stagg and use the Janet Jackson Memorial Halftime to install the single-wing. The Eagles could hope for that.

Not that it would help, not when the Patriots have Joe Montana at quarterback--er, Tom Brady. I get the two mixed up because every Super Bowl story that isn't about Terrell Owens' ankle is about how Tom Brady is Joe Montana, only taller and with a scruffy red beard. The amazing thing is, I almost believe it. This, after 15 years rebuffing all suggestions that anyone is as good as Montana. All that John Elway stuff, forget it. Peyton Manning, when he wins a Super Bowl, get back to me.

Still, before the AFC championship game, one misguided pundit (me) declared that if Manning and Brady were to switch teams, the Patriots would be the best team ever. The thinking, if you could call it thinking, was that Manning is the superior passer and would move the Patriots up that one little bit necessary to stand alongside the great dynasties. And here I confess the unconfessable. I was stupid.

What, ...