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, had I forgotten what Brady had done? Twice the MVP in Super Bowl victories? Undefeated in eight playoff games?

Here's how good the guy is. So good that people think he's taller than he is. Odd, but Jim Johnson said it. He's the Eagles' defensive coordinator, the man whose neck is next on the guillotine. Reporters asked Johnson what stood out about the Patriots. He said, "No question, Brady. And how big he is, and how he stands tall in that pocket. He's 6-5 (listed at 6-4), and it seems like he's 6-9 back there. Nothing bothers him."

Johnson then tried to define the indefinable, as to what Brady has that Montana had: "Just the coolness of him."

Hmm, is that a song? The Coolness of Him. Should be. "Cooler than the other side of the pillow," the old Lions linebacker Wayne Walker said of Montana. Brady does not move in the pocket with the flowing grace of Montana. He does move with an athletic certainty born of confidence that whatever happens back there, he can handle it.

Brady also has what all great passers have and what Montana had best of all. Jim Johnson on Brady again: "He has great vision downfield.... He has the knack to go back and find the second and third receiver all the time. He finds the people that are open."

Sometimes, when they're not open, he helps them get open. Consider that rip-their-heart-out pass early against the Steelers. Jerome Bettis couldn't make a fourth-down yard, and the Steelers lost the ball at the Patriots' 40. First play, Brady sent everybody deep and looked a defender into the middle, freeing up Deion Branch one-on-one with a novice Steelers cornerback--and Brady put the ball in the air 50 yards, a feather into Branch's hands, 60 yards for the touchdown. Cool. Patriots, 10-0. On the way to 41 points against a team with the NFL's best defensive statistics.

It is Tom Brady's world, and the rest of us are just visiting. So it's difficult to find criticism of him, though not impossible. A pundit named Jim Buzinski, writing for the gay sports website OutSports.com, scolded the nonpareil with a sentence unprecedented in sports journalism.

"Ditch the beard!" Buzinski told Brady. "You look like a Serbian rock star, and that's not meant as a compliment."

dkindred@sportingnews.com

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