IF EVER A system was created to prevent perfection, it is the revenue-sharing, asset-leveling, quasi-socialist enterprise known as the National Football League. Unlike other forms of corporate capitalism, the organizing principle of the NFL is rooted in the concept of parity. The purpose of parity is to make every contest competitive, to keep the promise of a mission statement that says any team should be able to beat any other team on any given Sunday.
This is the rigged, un-American system that Coach Bill Belichick's New England Patriots have been defying throughout a glorious fall and winter. This is why every New Englander who ever dreamed of winning the lottery or breaking the bank at Monte Carlo will be watching one of the four TV channels hereabouts that are carrying tonight's game - a game against a storied franchise that plays in the New Jersey Meadowlands yet still calls itself the New York Giants.
The real drama of this otherwise anodyne Jersey joust has nothing to do with the Pats' chance to outdo the 1972 Miami Dolphins, who won all 14 of their regular-season games that year, plus three playoff encounters. There can really be no comparison between then and now.
The crucial difference between the two eras is not merely that the diabolical Richard Nixon won a landslide reelection victory over George McGovern that November. On a pigskin timeline, the Dolphins' perfect season is tantamount to a museum artifact, something akin to a Hittite inscription from ancient Babylon.
There was no salary cap back then, nothing like the current free agency for players, and each year's schedule was not tilted, as it is today, to give the previous season's weakest teams the easiest opponents. All these equalizing devices were put in place to keep any team from doing what the Pats will have done if they whip the Giants tonight and waltz on through the playoffs and the Super Bowl.
So there really are profound historical and psychological reasons for jumping up and down in front of the boob tube tonight, rooting for Tom Brady and his mates to do what nobody else has ever done - and was never supposed to do. A Patriot victory tonight, signifying the completion of a perfect 16-0 regular season, may bestow a form of vindication on every Don Quixote who ever sallied forth against the invincible reality of the world as it is.
An unbeaten record would also be a persuasive riposte to envious outlanders who still fixate on this season's videotaping controversy, for which the Patriots were rightly docked a first-round pick in next year's draft. They never needed cameras. These Pats are not only winning clean; they are showing a society gone mad with narcissism what it means to place team before self. This is something worth cheering for.
