Warner: Rags, riches, repeat

Hopefully, the last 10 years have been better for you than for the Arizona Cardinals.

This is the first season since 1998 in which the Cardinals have been in the NFL playoffs, or even had a winning season. They haven't been this close to a Super Bowl since, well, since ever.

Today the Cardinals face birds of a different color, the Philadelphia Eagles, in the NFC title game in suburban Glendale. And greater Phoenix cares greatly.

It was a different story the last time I saw a Philly-Arizona game here. Yes, I do hold the dubious distinction of having seen one.

The year was 1998, a September Sunday the day after I covered the University of Arizona football team's 35-11 smackdown of Iowa in Tucson. Some friends and I, for reasons none of us ever really figured out, drove from Tucson to Tempe to sit outside in stifling desert heat to see two 0-2 teams none of us cared about.

Maybe we just wanted to cleanse our palate of the lopsided loss we'd seen the night before. Maybe we were just young and restless and bored, living by the sword.

Nah.

So the Eagles and Cardinals played for one quarter and two quarters and three quarters, and no one scored. It reminded me of an old joke when a married couple were supposed to go to a baseball game, but she dragged him shopping first. They didn't get to the ballpark until the ninth inning, walked in, saw the score was 0-0, and she said, "See, we haven't missed anything."

Except the fourth quarter began 0-0 and we really hadn't seen anything.

The crowd was 39,782 in Sun Devil Stadium in Tempe, which seats about twice that many. Half the fans were for Philadelphia. This wasn't the NFL the rest of the country knows. This was a place with only mild interest in the local team, a place where many residents came from somewhere else and cheered for other teams.

The Cardinals went on a rampage in the fourth quarter that day and won, 17-3. They went on to win nine games and land in the playoffs for the first time since they arrived in Phoenix in 1988.

But then came a lot more losing. Until this season.

The starting Cardinals quarterback, of course, is a 37-year-old lad from Cedar Rapids named Kurt Warner.

In 1998, Warner was an NFL rookie, the third-string quarterback for the St. Louis Rams. Donovan McNabb was a senior quarterback at Syracuse University.

The following year, Warner was the NFL's Most Valuable Player and the MVP of the Super Bowl, which St. Louis won. Two years after that, Warner's Rams defeated McNabb's Eagles, 29-24, in the NFC title game.

McNabb has been a prominent player ever since. Warner eventually moved on to New York and then Phoenix, had some ups and downs. He has endured injuries and benchings.

Arizona signed free agent Warner in 2005 but spent a 2006 first-round draft pick on Matt Leinart and quickly made him the QB.

It didn't take. Warner reclaimed the job in midseason last year and has 57 regular-season touchdown passes in the last two seasons.

Phoenix is now in love with the team.

An oft-heard question on national sports radio shows in the last few months is if Warner has played his way into a future spot in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

The consensus is probably, with an upgrade to certainly if Warner reaches another Super Bowl.

His story already was too unlikely to believe nine years ago.

You know the litany. Going from the University of Northern Iowa to stocking shelves at a Hy-Vee to Arena Football to NFL Europe to the top of the world.

How much overkill would it be to add fading from the national consciousness, then bouncing back for another Super Bowl at 37?

Twenty quarterbacks have been first-round draft picks since Warner got his first MVP honor.

Only two, Eli Manning and Ben Roethlisberger, have helped teams to Super Bowls. Another is Warner's backup.

Here is the undrafted guy from Cedar Rapids, a win from his third Super Bowl. Win or lose today, he remains one of the most incredible stories in NFL history.

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