Tony D’Amato: You’re a g*ddamn quarterback! You know what that means? It’s the top spot, kid. It’s the guy who takes the fall. It’s the guy everybody’s looking at first - the leader of a team - who will support you when they understand you. Who will break their ribs and their noses and their necks for you, because they believe. ‘Cause you make them believe. That’s a quarterback.

The Super Bowl of preseason games is over.

Bears - 27, Broncos - 17

As it turns out, I missed most of the final 3 quarters of this magnificent spectacle of football that doesn’t even count in the standings. First, the residential internet connection inexplicably goes kaput. And then my office server crashes. What fun indeed.

According to the dateline, Jay Mariotti was in Denver to witness Cutler’s homecoming. Whether you truly believe that extra effort to getting to Mile High Stadium actually occurred, is completely your call. However, it is quite apparent that Jay is clearly fond of Jay. For Chicagoans, a Jay Mariotti stamp of approval is about as fatalistic as appearing on the cover of Sports Illustrated or Madden Football.

But alas it seems obvious that Jay is quite infatuated with Jay. And Jay quickly rises to Jay’s defense (go to AOL dot com for further indigestion) when those big mean diaper wearing, pacifier sucking Broncos fans welcomed their outcast of a former starting quarterback:

How fascinating to see him take the high road, as he did last week when he voiced nice comments about McDaniels. This was a dramatic departure from the Cutler who was known as a jerk in his first three Denver seasons, the Cutler who picked verbal fights with San Diego quarterback Philip Rivers, the Cutler who never minced words, the Cutler described by Chargers linebacker Matt Wilhelm as “a punk” and “one of the biggest crybabies in the league.

Punk.

No wonder Jay’s tentacles arose spastically. 

Now where have we heard that word before? Where indeed.....

Oh yeah:

Denver Post columnist Jay Mariotti, then with the Rocky Mountain News, called Elway “a greedy and scared punk” and advised him: “Go ahead John, leave. Get out of Denver, baby. Go. You’ll be crawling back here after a week.”

But more people apparently thought Mariotti should leave than Elway.

Mariotti was doing his radio show at a local restaurant when four police officers appeared and surrounded him. When Mariotti asked why they were there, the officers told him that two death threats had been phoned in against him. This, of course, is the town where talk-show host Alan Berg was shot to death.

Told that Mariotti’s life had been threatened, Elway said with a laugh: “He deserves it. No, that’s off the record. He called me a greedy young punk. The guy’s never around here. He’s one of these guys that like to take potshots. I don’t worry too much about Jay Mariotti.”

God bless the Internet. And God equally bless the L.A. Times for archiving this little treasure of a column.

History kind of shows that things worked out just fine for John Elway and Denver.

Bears fans can certainly hope that Jay Cutler fares just as well for Chicago as Elway did for Mike Shanahan’s Broncos.

But just in case, perhaps it should be equally demanded of Mariotti to also label Cutler a “greedy and scared punk”. Why mess with good karma?