I am still in shock that the Patriots who managed to survive so many negative stories and stave off a few big upsets in the making this season haven't found a way to reverse the outcome of Super Bowl XLII. I am also in shock that I managed to walk the tightrope between implying that the Giants could actually win the game without harnessing the awesome power of this blog's jinx.

I can't remember the last time I actually called something before hand and had it come to pass. It may never have happened, I just don't feel like going back and looking through my posts to find it, on the off chance that I was ever right. I get the feeling that I was right in picking Dallas to beat Indianapolis in Dallas last year the week before Thanksgiving. And I think I picked the Bears to win against Seattle and New Orleans last year in the playoffs. But since then, it's been a bad, bad, bad run.

Unfortunately, I think that the NFL will be forced to find a way to have this game replayed until the Patriots can find a way to win. If not, then so many of our most respected sports journalists will continue to look even more foolish than they ordinarily do. For instance, Bill Simmons compared these Giants to the 1985 Pats. The podcast is still up on his site at ESPN, in case you don't believe me. If Roger Goodell and the league office allow this to stand, it might bring down the sports media as we know it.

Meanwhile, I got an email on Saturday from the guy I go to for my Red Sox info. He was out in Arizona for the game. And he had his picture taken with Jim McMahon. It seems very funny in retrospect, to have him out there with the QB whose team devastated, humiliated and set the Patriots back ten years with the savage beating the Bears inflicted that day. And all the while, Simmons is out there comparing the Pats opponent to the Pats of yesteryear. Although, I have to say Tom Coughlin is a lot like the evolutionary Ray Berry in the sense that he's kind of a tool.

This retrospect on what it felt like to see the undefeated Patriots fall apart in Arizona has to be my favorite Simmons column of all time now. One thing I'm not entirely sure of, as I talk about this loss with my friends who root for the Patriots, is whose fingerprints are on this spectacularly offensive offensive collapse. It's easy to blame McDaniel, but didn't Belichick promote him because he was an unknown and could serve as a strawman enabling Belichick to have even more control over the team? It seems like the arrogant game plan that seemed to be governed by the premise that all the Pats had to do was show up would bear this out, but then I might just be blinded by my hatred for Belichick.

It wouldn't be a normal day for Sedition in Red Sox Nation if Jay Mariotti hadn't found his own way to taint what should otherwise be as nearly perfect as a moment can be in sports fandom. The notion that the Patriots should be further punished for the report that came out of Saturday's Boston Herald claiming that the Pats cheated by videotaping the Rams pregame walkthrough before the 2002 Super Bowl is absurd. If they did cheat, it was dirty, shameless and beat. But it's also fairly unprofessional to punish a team now for what they did six years ago.

Professional sports aren't the real world. In a sense, it's not that different from punishing baseball players who took performance enhancers that were banned by other sports but not banned by baseball at the time the players took them. The NFL came down hard on the Patriots when they were caught red handed this year. If it happens again, they ought to come down harder on them. But if six years intervene between that incident and when the story came out, then it's St. Louis' tough luck. Maybe they should have had a guy make sure the stadium was empty if they didn't want people checking out their walkthrough.

The one good thing about this whole episode is that it reminded all of us that Arlen Specter is still alive and kicking in the US Senate. But as for this silly little story, I have a pretty solid record for disliking and ripping the Patriots, their coach and their owner. That said, I have no empathy or sympathy for Kurt Warner and the 2001 Rams. They had every chance to beat a team that was markedly inferior on paper. Knowing the Dick Vermeil/Mike Martz offense, I'm sure they had practiced other plays enough over the season that they could have made adjustments.

The real story is that those Rams didn't treat the game as seriously as they ought to have. They came in as a big favorite, having beaten the Pats on the road earlier in the year and playing in a dome against an outdoor team. They were the greatest show on turf and they failed to show up. It's not Roger Goodell's problem. Nor is it the problem of Congress. Taping other teams' signals isn't right, but neither is a retroactive investigation that really can't culminate in an appropriate or effective punishment.

In general, I try to avoid commenting on specific political candidates in this space, mostly because I realize that none of you give a damn what I think about a particular candidate. But I think we need to throw a tool of note award in Mitt Romney's direction. Romeny's campaign came out today and claimed that John McCain and Mike Huckabee made some sort of illicit "backroom" deal to deny Romney the delegates from W Va. To me, it seemed like more than a little sour grapes from Romney. Or perhaps a sense of frustration because he didn't think of it first, if in fact anything untoward was done.

In case you care, in the interest of equal time, Sedition in Red Sox Nation is forced into an anti-McCain stance because he is supported by Curt Schilling. Mike Huckabee is out because he reminds me of the Homer Stokes character from O Brother Where Art Thou. Fred Thompson is out because he was in Die Hard 2. And Rudy was out because he has a bad comb-over, although I defy anyone to show me a good comb-over, and he did a terrible cameo in Anger Management. Kind of funny, isn't it, the thought process through which we here approach the democratic process.

So, since everybody knows that 19-0 is inevitable, the Patriots and the city of Boston have scheduled the victory parade. As the people involved are mental giants of the first order, they have scheduled this parade for the Tuesday following the Super Bowl. That day just happens coincide with Super Tuesday, when Massachusetts voters are supposed to turn out for their presidential primaries.

After all, any Patriots fan who comes out of the inevitable festivities too intoxicated or otherwise impaired to do their civic duty is probably doing the Republic, if not the world, a favor. God knows, enough morons vote, what's twenty or thirty thousand nitwits when 20 or 20 million will vote on Super Tuesday? Who knows, maybe a lower than normal turnout in Massachusetts will finish off Mitt Romney. At this point, with the way he's come back from being written off in this election season, I'd believe it if Mitt ended up starring in a cheesy horror film (to paraphrase the Johnathan Winters character from It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World)

I am not one of those people who will complain that the victory parade shouldn't conflict with the electoral process. After all, Tuesday is the only day it could possibly happen. It's just too short a turn around to expect the players to undergo a strenuous public appearance on Monday after the game is played Sunday evening in Arizona. Imagine the jet lag.

As for Wednesday, or a date thereafter... it simply can't work because eight Patriots have to go to the Pro Bowl which is to be played in Hawaii the Sunday after the Super Bowl. Now most people don't think Pro Bowl practices are critical, what with the fact that defenses are restricted in the sorts of schemes they can run and are forbidden to blitz. So there really shouldn't be much game planning, right?

Unfortunately, when you deal with vast intellects like the ones exhibited when Brady, Light, Vrabel et al. take center stage, even a Pro Bowl game plan starts to look like nuclear physics. And for my part, I'd hate to think that these Patriots might miss even one public appearance in Hawaii for the sake of a public appearance in Boston. Imagine what the harsh New England winter weather could do to Gisele's hair. The horror, the horror...as Kurtz would say.

This impending victory parade could be the first local appearance for Brady and Gisele after their engagement. Rumor has it, Brady has promised to spring for an engagement ring for Gisele if (when) the Patriots win the Super Bowl. Granted, the rumor originated in the National Enquirer so we have to take it with a grain of salt.

But my question is, what happens in the extremely unlikely the event of a miraculous upset? If the Giants win, what does Gisele get? A promise ring? A tennis braclet? One of those diamond heart pendants from Zales that will be advertised to death before Valentine's Day? Or does Tom have the backbone to give her nothing after this season is over. To tell the truth, I'd finally have some respect for him if he pulled that move.

Everything is lining up for the Patriots to beat the Giants severely, a perfect storm, as Bill Simmons put it. The layoff before the Super Bowl tends to favor the favorite. They've already beaten the Giants in the Meadowlands in December, so it should be a cake walk in Arizona.

Even better, this 19-0 season will have been achieved at a negligible cost. After all, it's only the collective soul of the New England Patriots that purchased this historic season. In the article linked above, Simmons referenced the book Blueprint, which documented the process in which Belichick, Kraft and Paoli built the three time champions. If the author of that book wants to chronicle this team, perhaps he could title the work: How to Go From David to Goliath in Seven Years.

Simmons compared a potential Green Bay vs. New England Super Bowl to the 1980 Olympic hockey game between the US and the USSR, in the sense that the entire country would be behind Favre in the same way that the Miracle on Ice game galvanized the nation back in the day. It is an interesting analogy, but I think this Giants team is better suited to the part.

Nobody went into the Lake Placid games thinking Team USA could beat the Russians, except Team USA. The game wasn't even on live TV. It was only as the game got going that people realized they were watching something historic, memorable and pretty damn amazing. It's only with 20-20 hindsight that people think that the Miracle on Ice game grasped American hearts and minds and it became a big deal. And deservedly so, it was an epic win for an underdog.

In the movie Patton, right as the German tanks are starting to make their breakthroughs in the Ardennes in the winter of 1944, the general says something very memorable. Patton says: There's absolutely no reason for us to assume. . .that the Germans are mounting a major offensive. The weather is awful and their supplies are low. The Germans haven't mounted a winter attack since Frederick the Great. Therefore I believe that's exactly what they're going to do.

Now I'm not saying the Giants can win. I'm not saying they're going to win. I'm not saying that even if they were allowed to play 14 on 11, any team could stop the Patriots from fulfilling destiny and going 19-0 or even 38-0. It's just one more thing that I want to have out there, along with what I wrote Tuesday last, on the off chance that in this historic season the one mark Tom Brady fails to achieve is that of becoming the first absolute douche to quarterback a team to four Super Bowl wins.

Speaking of QBs who won four Super Bowls, not too long ago, I caught Failure to Launch on cable. And it wasn't very good, even for that dismal genre. But I watched the whole damn thing because Terry Bradshaw stole the show. He was great. I really believe that he should have won an Oscar for that. Too bad the Oscars have to go to whatever films "challenge the intellect" or justify the politics of the populist view when there isn't a clear cut great movie like The Godfather or Gladiator out there.

I'm getting kind of tired of prefacing each of my increasingly rare posts with an apology. But it gets kind of old after a while, sitting here in front of the computer trying to invent reasons why a given team has a chance to beat the Patriots. And should I indulge in speculation on what team will give up which prospects and position players to get Johann Santana away from Minnesota? It's just not all that interesting to me at the moment.

I suppose I could take a sort of grim satisfaction from the fact that the Patriots have become everything which they were not supposed to be two years or so ago when every talking head and his brother insisted on holding them up as the model of virtue and excellence in professional sports. But even that gets old after a while.

I must confess, I was disappointed to see the way the Patriots reacted to Anthony Smith's "guarantee." It was disgusting to see Tom Brady go out of his way to get in his face after the first TD pass. Brady is, regrettably, a Hall of Fame quarterback on a record setting pace. Anthony Smith is a second year nobody whom the media exploited to generate more interest in a non-story.

There was a time when Brady was supposed to be a paragon of how to succeed with class and dignity. There is very little that smacks of class and dignity in going out of your way to put down a guy who barely even ran his mouth. Could you see Joe Montana or Terry Bradshaw doing that? Hell, Bradshaw never seemed to go out of his way to talk trash to Hollywood Henderson, who said considerably more insulting things about Bradshaw than any one has ever said about Brady.

Now the Patriots are playing the Jets again. Thankfully the media has an easy angle courtesy of the whole taping signals scandal to justify hours of coverage devoted to a very mediocre game. Conventional wisdom tells us that the Jets have no chance to win this game. Unfortunately, I can see no reason to disagree everybody and his brother for a change.

In other news, George Mitchell has finally delivered his report on steroids in Major League Baseball after 20 months of what surely was a exhaustive and ethically conducted investigation. In a blaze of vindication for those who have dragged Roger Clemens' name through the mud on this issue for the last two years or so, his name is at the top of the list of high-profile players who are named.

If you had told me earlier that losing to an unknown despite running not only as an incumbent but the sitting Senate Majority Leader to boot would end up not being the most embarassing professional failure of George Mitchell's career, I wouldn't have believed it. And then he had to go and release this report.

If sources like discredited and terminated former Yankees strength and conditioning coach Brian McNamee are at all typical of the informers who are expected to provide the Mitchell Report with its substance, then I am willing to bet guys like Clemens, Tejada and Pettitte will have little to fear from these proceedings.

This report which tells us many things we already knew (like MLB dragged its collective feet on the steroids issue) amid its hearsay and innuendo about respected players and choice nuggets about players who have already been caught cheating like Giambi, will likely go down in the annals of justice with hard-hitting and epoch shaping events like the Red Scare, the Army-McCarthy hearings and the Salem Witch Trials.

Curiously, outside of Eric Gagne, no one of consequence from the Boston Red Sox was named in this document. Thankfully, and perhaps conveniently, Brendan Donnelly was not offered a contract today. Interesting....