Super Bowl Football Game

Allen Channel's house is usually party central on Super Bowl Sunday. Not this year. With a new baby and a worsening economy, the 39-year-old office manager decided to cancel the get-together he has put on for friends and family for the last eight years. He'll still watch as the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Arizona Cardinals fight for the Super Bowl title -- but not at his Fullerton home. He'll be at his brother's house in Oceanside, where the bash will double as his birthday party.

In his annual Super Bowl news conference Friday, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said the league would take a hard look at bringing the Super Bowl back to Los Angeles in 2016 -- the 50th anniversary of the game -- whether or not the city has a team. The first Super Bowl was held in L.A., at the Coliseum, and 2016 would also mark the 70th anniversary of the 1946 L.A. Rams, the first integrated major professional sports team. L.A.

The high school coach thinks of Edgerrin James when he looks at the football field. "He wrote a check to upgrade our facilities, our field, a big number like $100,000," Israel Gallegos said. The restaurant manager thinks of James when it gets crowded. "He didn't go to New York for the big NFL draft party -- he stayed here and threw a party for everyone," Linda Lozano says at her Mexican restaurant. "It was packed. People waited outside."

The Cardinals have had a lot of success in the playoffs running trick plays, or even just misdirections. Two that come to mind were long passes from Kurt Warner to Larry Fitzgerald. The first, at Carolina, was a fake pitch that froze the defense, followed by a bomb to Fitzgerald, who outleaped the two defenders sandwiching him and made the catch. Then, in the NFC championship game against Philadelphia, Warner pitched to J.J. Arrington, who threw it back to him.

The fairy tale is that, if he wins Sunday, the Arizona Cardinals quarterback has promised to buy his family a puppy. The reality show is that the Pittsburgh Steelers are going to whip the dog out of him. The fairy tale is that, while dining with his family every Friday night before home games, the Arizona Cardinals quarterback picks up a stranger's bill. The reality show is that the Pittsburgh Steelers are going to cash him out.

Stung by the recession, some of the United States' biggest companies are slashing their advertising budgets. But television viewers won't know it from watching the commercials during this year's Super Bowl. Fans tuning in for the championship game Sunday will see 2 1/2 straight minutes of commercials they can watch in 3-D with special glasses.

The NFL is willing to consider a return to its Los Angeles roots. Evidently, so are the San Diego Chargers. While the league is kicking around the notion of playing the 50th Super Bowl in L.A. -- where the first one took place -- the onetime L.A. Chargers appear to be inching closer to a possible return to their birthplace. As is always the case with the on-again, off-again saga of the NFL's flirtation with the nation's second-largest market, nothing is written in stone.

The world champion Los Angeles Raiders. The name has quite a ring to it. A big, glistening Super Bowl ring -- the only one ever won by an L.A. team; a ring from the 1983 season that seldom leaves the finger of old Raiders such as defensive lineman Greg Townsend. He remembers Raiders owner Al Davis "wanted a ring so nice and clean, if we met the queen we wouldn't be afraid to show it to her." Twenty-five years ago, the Raiders were king. This is, appropriately, their silver anniversary.

On the surface, this Super Bowl is a super blowout. It's steel versus sandstone. Road graders versus roadrunners. Iron City versus Sun City. But the Arizona Cardinals are capable of beating the Pittsburgh Steelers in Super Bowl XLIII. And, if they play the way they did Sunday, they will.

I'm trying to write these eight words, nobody has written them before, nobody has even considered anything like them in decades, and it's hard. There is confetti caked to my shoes, a hugging player's sweat on my notebook, an insistent roar filling my ears, thousands of waving white towels blinding my eyes, and the wonder of tackle Deuce Lutui stuck in my brain.