DALLAS - The confetti is shot from the cannons, the sun rises in the morning, and the talk turns to dynasties. It is what happens at the Super Bowl, almost every year.
It is not a stupid conversation, but a meaningless one. Anybody who watches the NFL knows just how hard it is to win a championship, how many things have to go right, how two or three of the wrong injuries at the wrong time can derail everything, how prosperity is an NFL team's greatest enemy.
So this is not a dynasty discussion concerning the Green Bay Packers. It is a little bit more subtle than that. There will be no proclamations here that the Packers are loaded and ready to win another Super Bowl or two. Instead, this:
That the Packers appear prepared to be to the NFC what the Patriots, Colts and Steelers have been to the AFC.
That the Packers look as if they are ready to become a perennial and formidable obstacle in the path to the title.
Which is just one more reason why it is going to be even harder for Andy Reid finally to get his trophy.
For just about his entire tenure, the NFC has been the National Football Crapshoot. No team has been dominant, or been that kind of every-year force. (Truth be told, the closest the NFC has come to having that kind of team might just have been the 2002-03-04 Eagles. Which is now 7 years ago.)
Every year, there were a half-dozen decent teams. Usually, one or two came together and made a big run but it was always fleeting, the momentum evaporating in the spring air. You had the impression that the goal was to catch lightning and nothing more.
Well, now you have this Packers team - which has a 27-year old quarterback named Aaron Rodgers who can hit a moving target at 40 paces in a way that few before him have. It has a monster of a tight end named Jermichael Finley, who didn't even play in the second half of the season because of a hamstring injury. It has an offense that was superb without a real running threat, an issue that can be addressed. It has difference-makers like Clay Matthews and Charles Woodson on defense, as well as a top-level defensive coordinator in Dom Capers.
They have lots of pieces, if they can keep them healthy and motivated.
"Yeah, I know it's been a while," Rodgers said yesterday, when asked about repeating. "I think this is the 11th or the 10th different team, in the last 10 years, from the NFC, to represent the NFC in the Super Bowl. It's a challenge, but I feel like we are kind of reloading.
"We are going to have the best tight end in the NFL back into the mix here. I think we are getting, I think, 15 guys back from IR. I'm sure a number of those guys will be back. It will be a different team. Every team has a different face to it, every year, different players, guys come and go, but I think the core, the nucleus of this team, is intact to make runs like this for the next 4 or 5 years."
It is hard to argue the point. This Packers team really does seem to be set up for a period of time. That doesn't mean it will be unbeatable, or even the prohibitive favorite. But it will be there, persistently there, starting next year.
"It's going to be exciting," Packers coach Mike McCarthy said. "On paper, it's a lot like this year. Coming out of training camp, it was the best football team that I'd stood in front of. I knew we had an excellent opportunity to win the Super Bowl, and definitely, you look at our returning roster next year, it's going to be the same type of situation. I'll be very excited to coach these guys. It's a great core group. Our locker room is better than it's ever been. Winning definitely helps it, no doubt about it. Definitely I'll be very excited just like the rest of the coaching staff to get started when it comes around."
Someone asked about the pressure of trying to win the Lombardi Trophy while playing in a stadium that sits on Lombardi Avenue.
"Well, I look at history and tradition as an asset, and we feel very blessed in Green Bay to have a tremendous history and tradition, and that's something that now we're a part of, we're permanently part of, and that will be something that we'll use as a strength and an outlook," McCarthy said.
"So I don't look at it as pressure. I don't feel stress from it. I embrace it. It's something that players feed off of. We celebrate it as fine as any sports organization in the world, and we've added to it. So to me, our tradition and history and our ability to repeat, that's exciting to us. That's the next challenge."
They are neither an immovable object nor an irresistible force. But they are there, and they aren't going away. Right now, the next-best teams in the NFC - and the Eagles are one of that handful - are clearly a cut below. That was the message of the Eagles' two games against the Packers last season. That was the message underlined by Super Bowl XLV.
Philadelphia Daily News wrote: