A different era, a different fate.

What if there'd been no Vince Lombardi? No St. Vincent creating the Packers? What if the great man never coached beyond high school? What if, after he failed to get a head coaching job in college, the folks at Green Bay also had said no to him? If Vincent Thomas Lombardi never had become Vince Lombardi, we'd have no Lombardi Trophy for the Super Bowl champion, no Lombardi Award for college linemen. Remove the Lombardi mythology and we'd never have heard John Facenda, the NFL Films voice of God, declare, "Lombardi, a certain magic still lingers in the very name. It speaks of duels in the snow and the cold November mud."

Along with George Halas and Paul Brown, Bear Bryant and Woody Hayes, Lombardi embodied the essence of football. Tactics, manner, speeches, vocabulary, body language--it all served as a model for coaches and leaders everywhere. To imagine the game--or America--without Vince Lombardi is to imagine all of us diminished.

And yet ...

He might have been cast into outer darkness, lost forever, if today's standards had applied 43 years ago--because Vince Lombardi didn't tell the whole truth then any more than George O'Leary told the whole truth last year.

Today, it's considered a crime against society to embellish one's academic and athletic record. Punishment has been firing and disgrace, after which the miscreant is sent away from the Golden Dome to suffer in shame on the Minnesota tundra.

Had folks in 1959 felt the same way, it's possible the Green Bay bosses would have said, "Vinnie, we love what you've done at Army and with the Giants. But we've checked that `cum laude' thing. We've checked the `law school' thing. We're going to have to say we're sorry, but we can't take a chance on a man who'd allow lies to stand in his bio."

The O'Leary-Lombardi connection "did dawn on me," says David Maraniss, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist whose Lombardi biography was published in 1999. "But there are differences, serious differences, between what O'Leary did and what Lombardi did. For one, Lombardi never lied to get a job."