And so began the great period of darkness....

....otherwise known as the period between the end of football and the beginning of baseball, during which the only flash of light to be found is the Figure Skating World Championships. (No, I am not a March Madness fan, although there was some poignance to be found in Syracuse's winning of the NCAA tournament last year on the day my family left that city.)

So, now that some hours have past, you're probably thinking it's time for cooler heads to prevail, and for me to dispassionately offer my congratulations to the newly-crowned Super Bowl Champions.

As Paul Buchman used to say, "Never gonna happen, my friends."

But anyway, one of my commenters points out, after my initial gnashing-of-the-teeth, that "dynasty" talk is already starting with respect to the Stupid Patriots*. Yes, this may be premature in this era of "parity", but the StuPats** do, perhaps, exemplify something I wrote after last year's Super Bowl: I think that the idea that dynasties can't happen in the salary-cap, free-agency era may be wrong. Here's what I wrote then:

However, it seems at least partly true that the old style of dynasty may be a thing of the past: a team putting together a core of players and keeping that core together for a long period of time. Future dynasties, thus, may not be the result of accretion of great talent on a single team, but rather by great front-office personnel and coaches on a team. Scouts and coaches are going to be more important in the future, and whereas we very well may not see a Pittsburgh Steelers of the 1970s again, I also think we're unlikely to see a situation where a Chuck Knoll or a Don Shula or a Tom Landry can coach a colossus but then spend ten years coaching mediocre teams because the colossus eventually got dismantled....Selection of personnel is going to get more important, and this is the real reason why the Bengals and Cardinals are such train-wrecks: not only do they lack talent, but they also lack the proper management team to bring in talent in an era when talent can be acquired much more easily and not nearly as capriciously as in the day when there was the draft and little else.

The Bills have had pretty good player selection over the last few years, but the coaching lagged. The StuPats, though, have had both excellent player selection and coaching (yeah, Belichick's a freaking genius, yada yada yada). Add to that the fact that they apparently have a cluster of picks at the top of this year's draft, which will allow them to bring in young talent that will theoretically come of age after the current bunch of nauseating StuPats like Ty Law and Willie McGinest move on, and this might just well be as much of a dynasty as is possible in today's NFL. (Or they could finally make me happy and start going 5-11 again. But we all know that just isn't going to happen, especially since in this football version of Der Freischutz Adam Vinatieri seems to be enacting, he never gets to that sixth bullet. And yes, that's an obscure opera reference.)

* Yes, I will be referring to them as "the Stupid Patriots" until the cycle begins anew, which I take to be the opening of training camp. Deal with it! If Steven Den Beste gets to talk nasty about France, I get to talk nasty about the Stupid Patriots.

** I will use "StuPats" as a contraction, occasionally, for "Stupid Patriots".