As I said, it’s old school versus new school; it’s all about the quarterbacks, or perhaps, what the quarterbacks symbolize.
For Super Bowl, Focus Is on Passing, Perhaps of a Torch
There was a sense of farewell to each conversation. Manning even used the past tense when asked what he had said, answering that he told Brady and Belichick that it had been an honor to compete against them.
It was an interlude that might have summed up an epoch of N.F.L. playoff football, a period that the 39-year-old Manning is about to leave behind.
Manning’s next game, fittingly in the 50th Super Bowl, will be contested in a new pro football era, and the proof of that will be found on the opposite sideline, where his counterpart on the Carolina Panthers will be the new-age quarterback Cam Newton…. The contrasts between the quarterbacks will be the main story line.
“Fittingly.” It’s all about the narrative and the predictive programming, in the end:
“I still don’t get why he has to (be criticized). And maybe there are some people out there who are concerned with who he is, which I think is terrible. I really do.You think in this time, this day and age, it would be more about who he is as an athlete, as a person more than anything else. Hopefully we can get past those things.”
“Hopefully”, the Lacedaemonians said.