TAMPA, Fla. -- We don't watch Super Bowls for the chip dip, as Bruce Springsteen wisecracked during his 12-minute party. We crave the emotional bull rush, a crescendo finish, the natural high that Michael Phelps finds in a marijuana pipe. The big game used to bore like a 4 a.m. infomercial, but Sunday, it delivered again, like last year, hijacking our senses with head-banging, back-and-forth drama that even might have thrilled The Boss, the rocker who hates football.
TAMPA, Fla. -- You know it's a different Super Bowl when hotel rooms are available, ticket scalpers are on suicide watch and -- bear with me here -- someone thinks it's a good idea to have ME??? walk the red carpet and pose for paparazzi outside an ESPN party. It's one thing to experience an economic recession in this country, quite another to swallow a complete cultural meltdown.
Yet once you're back in the real world, away from Lindsay Lohan and DJ Samantha Ronson in her pink-and black-striped fingerless gloves, a January tradition smacks you in the chops like, well, a Terrible Towel. If little else is certain in the world, the Pittsburgh Steelers have become an American constant, disregarding NFL parity and their smallish market to become the best-run franchise in professional sports. No? The Steelers are about to win their sixth Super Bowl trophy, their second in four years, and if there's another organization on the national scene that meshes the robust echoes of its past with 21st-century efficiency, then I must need a Lasik do-over. Because I'm not seeing it.
TAMPA, Fla. -- He's doing it for the kids. That's what Santonio Holmes wants us to believe, anyway. When he uses the global Super Bowl platform to disclose his first occupation in life -- selling drugs in his hometown of Belle Glade, Fla., a dismal place of crime and poverty about three hours and 10 back roads from here -- he says he's showing children how to learn from his youthful errors.
"We don't have a Wal-Mart. We don't have a Target. There are maybe two grocery stores, no movie theaters, no mall,'' he said. "There isn't really anything to do where we live, so all you're going to do is chase rabbits, go to school and play football -- or you're going to stand on a corner and sell drugs.''
TAMPA, Fla. -- Admittedly, I am worried. I've seen too many giggly sportswriters, too many smackgobbed football players and too many awestruck NFL officials who usually act like cardboard cutouts. I never felt this way when the Stones were being censored, when Prince did "Purple Rain'' in a downpour, when Tom Petty dug into his nasal cavity on "Free Fallin','' when Britney swapped spit with Aerosmith or even when Justin Timberlake gave Janet Jackson's outfit a ripple...
And let the world see her nipple.
But for the first time, as the lines between sports and entertainment blur into an almost indistinguishable blob, my sense is that the Super Bowl halftime show might be as big -- or bigger -- than the Super Bowl itself.
TAMPA, Fla. -- When his world went numb last month, when his head slammed wickedly against the ground as he was flattened by two Cleveland defenders, Ben Roethlisberger recalls being scared, sure. He couldn't feel anything in his arms. A team doctor stuck him with a pin, and he couldn't feel that, either. He lay there for 15 minutes and was hauled away on a stretcher, the victim of his third concussion in three years.
He would have headaches. Next time he tried putting on his helmet, he had trouble squeezing into it because his skull had swelled. They made him take a computer exam days later to determine if he was lucid. "They show you a bunch of words and you have to remember what they were," he said. "You have to remember shapes and colors and things like that."
TAMPA, Fla. -- Perched at a table in the sun, surrounded by swarms of reporters and cameras poised for The Moment, Larry Fitzgerald scanned the scene with a puzzled gaze.
"I'm looking for him. I don't know where he's at yet,'' he said, his braided hair flopping behind him, his eyes darting through the 2,100-body pileup known as Super Bowl Media Day.
TAMPA, Fla. -- Ever see so many robots, automatons and, OK, fibbers? This is the first Broken Family Super Bowl, featuring the criss-crossing career dramas of Ken Whisenhunt, Mike Tomlin, Ben Roethlisberger, Russ Grimm and the front offices of the Arizona Cardinals and Pittsburgh Steelers. Yet with painstaking adamance, all are claiming -- to a man, to an exclamation point, to a stretch of every muscle in the body -- not to harbor even slight personal motives in settling professional scores Sunday.
TAMPA, Fla. -- Why be shortsighted about this? If the issue is whether Kurt Warner belongs in the Hall of Fame, why restrict him to a round building in Ohio with a football popping out the roof? How about Ripley's Believe it or Not Museum? The Louvre and the Smithsonian? The Hy-Vee Supermarkets Aisle of Fame? I'd even propose a lifetime Good Husband medal for a man so devoted to his wife, he just broke the record for most postgame tears spilled in her honor.
That mark previously belonged to Rod Tidwell. The fact he played fictitiously in Jerry Maguire for the Arizona Cardinals, the perfect farcical organization for the Tom Cruise-as-sports-agent movie, supplies even more evidence that Warner has cracked the code for Canton and other immortality shrines. Not only has he fashioned the all-time, bags-to-riches, can't-be-duplicated, beyond-hallucinatory fairy tale, he has done so while reviving two dubious, downtrodden franchises: the Cardinals and St. Louis Rams.
GLENDALE, Ariz. -- Feel free to believe in reincarnation, peace on earth, honest politicians, Spam, Mickey Rourke and the sobriety of Hollywood bimbos. It's one thing for a stadium to rise from the dust like an enormous metal mushroom, quite another for it to emit hallucinogens that would transform the Arizona Cardinals -- I repeat, the Arizona Cardinals -- into an irrepressible red army.
TAMPA, Fla. -- You know it's a different Super Bowl when hotel rooms are available, ticket scalpers are on suicide watch and -- bear with me here -- someone thinks it's a good idea to have ME??? walk the red carpet and pose for paparazzi outside an ESPN party. It's one thing to experience an economic recession in this country, quite another to swallow a complete cultural meltdown.
TAMPA, Fla. -- He's doing it for the kids. That's what Santonio Holmes wants us to believe, anyway. When he uses the global Super Bowl platform to disclose his first occupation in life -- selling drugs in his hometown of Belle Glade, Fla., a dismal place of crime and poverty about three hours and 10 back roads from here -- he says he's showing children how to learn from his youthful errors.
TAMPA, Fla. -- Admittedly, I am worried. I've seen too many giggly sportswriters, too many smackgobbed football players and too many awestruck NFL officials who usually act like cardboard cutouts. I never felt this way when the Stones were being censored, when Prince did "Purple Rain'' in a downpour, when Tom Petty dug into his nasal cavity on "Free Fallin','' when Britney swapped spit with Aerosmith or even when Justin Timberlake gave Janet Jackson's outfit a ripple...
TAMPA, Fla. -- When his world went numb last month, when his head slammed wickedly against the ground as he was flattened by two Cleveland defenders, Ben Roethlisberger recalls being scared, sure. He couldn't feel anything in his arms. A team doctor stuck him with a pin, and he couldn't feel that, either. He lay there for 15 minutes and was hauled away on a stretcher, the victim of his third concussion in three years.
TAMPA, Fla. -- Perched at a table in the sun, surrounded by swarms of reporters and cameras poised for The Moment, Larry Fitzgerald scanned the scene with a puzzled gaze. 
TAMPA, Fla. -- Why be shortsighted about this? If the issue is whether Kurt Warner belongs in the Hall of Fame, why restrict him to a round building in Ohio with a football popping out the roof? How about Ripley's Believe it or Not Museum? The Louvre and the Smithsonian? The Hy-Vee Supermarkets Aisle of Fame? I'd even propose a lifetime Good Husband medal for a man so devoted to his wife, he just broke the record for most postgame tears spilled in her honor.
GLENDALE, Ariz. -- Feel free to believe in reincarnation, peace on earth, honest politicians, Spam, Mickey Rourke and the sobriety of Hollywood bimbos. It's one thing for a stadium to rise from the dust like an enormous metal mushroom, quite another for it to emit hallucinogens that would transform the Arizona Cardinals -- I repeat, the Arizona Cardinals -- into an irrepressible red army.
