The Panthers? Nice team, no chance.(Carolina Panthers)

My perfect football game would involve 120 passes. Nothing is much more beautiful than a ball describing an arc through the sky on its rise and descent to a man in full flight himself. Montana to Rice, Bradshaw to Swann, Manning to Harrison. It all seems so impossible until it's done, and then it's so breathtaking you want to see it done again. Maybe we'd run the ball two or three times a day, mix in a draw just to keep the defense honest. Otherwise, we'd put air under it and keep it flying.

So I have a sense that Super Bowl 38 might not be my cup of tea. More likely, it will be my cup of tea smashed into my teeth.

What the Patriots did to Peyton Manning and Marvin Harrison in the AFC championship game was remind us again that whatever else football is, it is first a contest of man-to-man physical strength. He who hits hardest, fastest and most often wins.

Fourteen games in a row now, the Patriots have won operating from the basic philosophy that football is a hurtin' game, and he who brings the heaviest hurt wins. Be nice if the Patriots were to play their philosophic opposites in a Super Bowl, but in fact they dispensed with that airy debate by pounding the Colts into disoriented submission. Now they go at a lesser version of themselves, the Panthers.

Nice team, the Panthers. A thrilling example of the NFL's razor's edge separating travail from triumph: Across their last 50 games, they went 3-23 and then 18-6. Good for Charlotte, too, where for too long the sports pages ran lurid with tales of alcoholism, racism, murder for hire, murder by passion, sexual harassment and death by street racing.

Still. It's a football game, not a feelgoodfest.

Give me the Patriots, 31-7.