It is Super Bowl time, and the tale of two cities, Denver and Dallas, is shouted antiphonally from towering stadium tiers: It is the best of times! It is the best of times! It is the season for bumper stickers and bunting and bragging in bars, for celebration and civic pride. Time for whimsy and WE'RE NO.l!, for good cheer and bad bets. It is a time warp, where the young dream of growing up and the old remember youth, and in the delirious identification with a winning football team, neither fantasy nor reminiscence seems foolish. The game becomes a bond strong enough to unite, however temporarily, the disparate elements of an urban society. In Dallas and in Denver, where football is a passion, not a fancy, the trip to the Super Bowl is a municipal journey.
The towns love their teams fiercely, each in its own style, and the teams, in turn, reflect in a measure the characters of their cities. Denver, wild and woolly jumping-off point for prospectors, outfitting depot for dreams. It mattered nothing that a man could scratch and sift his way through grubstake after grubstake without success. The lodes were somewhere out there in the Rockies for the patient and the tenacious. The fevered sport of searching for gold and silver is the original version of "Wait 'til next year!"
So it was for the Denver Broncos and their loyal, long-suffering fans. The Broncos had been the door mat of pro football —13 straight years before they fashioned a winning season. But with more true grit than could be found in the poorest prospector's pan, Denver fans turned out to cheer their team. The Broncos have sold out every home game played in the '70s, and every year the list of masochists ordering season tickets grew by the thousands. This year, the faithful finally struck the mother lode, division title, American Conference championship, a berth in the Super Bowl.
Dallas is a trader's town, a place for shrewd operators from the time of its founding in 1840, on a likely river crossing, by a canny settler of the Texas Republic's northern Indian frontier. Roads and rails soon branched away from the site, and Dallas began to do big business in buying, selling, managing and shipping the goods of the Southwest. In succession came buffalo hides, cotton, wheat and oil, banks to make loans for a percentage of the profits and insurance companies to underwrite them. It is a city of wealth wrought with sharp pencils and calculating minds.
The Dallas Cowboys were put together in the same manner, with a loan officer's eye for the sure, steady return and an actuary's fetish for minutiae. Formed the same year as the Broncos, the Cowboys have been, over the past 18 seasons, the most successful team in football. Dallas devised a computerized scouting system that catalogued the requirements of the sport in fractions of inches and split seconds. The Cowboys have turned up blue-chip players with clockwork regularity, including prospects found in fields foreign to the gridiron. Track stars, basketball players —not to mention the occasional Heisman Trophy winner—have contributed to the impressive return on Dallas' investments: the play-offs eleven times in the past twelve years, five National Conference titles, one Super Bowl championship.