The NFL wants its trophy back.

Well, technically not for another fortnight, but two weeks from now, we’ll be reading about the Super Bowl champion (team to be determined), who won Super Bowl XXXVII in San Diego on Sunday night. We’ll have seen images of the Vince Lombardi trophy being proudly carried around the Qualcomm Stadium turf, and around here, we’ll think back to that magical February night at the New Orleans Superdome.

And then it will hit us.

It’s someone else’s turn. We are the champions no longer. The one-year reign is over, as quickly as that.

Truthfully, the Lombardi trophy is not like the Stanley Cup, where there’s just one trophy (well, two, if you count the permanent one at the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto) that’s passed around from year to year. The winning team of each year’s NFL title game gets the Lombardi trophy for keeps, so the executive offices at Gillette Stadium do not have to empty their trophy case of its most preeminent resident.

But it’s time to say goodbye nonetheless to that seven-pound sterling-silver obelisk.

Numerous questions now must be answered.

After the upcoming Super Bowl, can Patriots fans rightfully wear their SUPER BOWL XXXVI CHAMPIONS hats and shirts anymore, or do they have to retire them permanently to the closet? Can Patriots Nation realistically walk with that swagger and strut anymore? More importantly, how will the Patriots’ Super Bowl championship ultimately be remembered outside of New England?

When NFL Films released its Super Bowl XXXVI highlight video/DVD in March, it sold more than half a million copies, instantly becoming the top-selling sports video of all time. No, I’m not talking about the top-selling NFL video of all time; I’m talking about the top selling sports video of all time, bar none. It has reportedly sold over 600,000 copies by now — double the amount of any of the previous 35 Super Bowl videos sold — and even out-sold any of the Making of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue films.

Now the Patriots’ Super Bowl video is as outdated as any New York Yankees championship-season video.

Maybe all those folks who said prior to this season that the 2002 Pats’ title was a fluke were right. Maybe that championship team really was a one-year wonder.

Who are we to argue now?

New England’s NFL entity went from 5-11 in 2000-’01 to 11-5 last season. Without the "tuck rule" (correctly) called in the AFC playoff semifinal, or without a coin-flip win prior to the extra session at snowy Foxboro Stadium that January night, perhaps none of this championship stuff would have happened. The Oakland Raiders would certainly agree on that.

As we all know, the Patriots won all three of their playoff games last year, despite the fact that they scored only three offensive touchdowns over the course of that post-season trifecta. Every break that there was to get, they got, and team defense and special-teams miracles got them over the hump.

This season, New England opened by pummeling two teams that ultimately made the playoffs — the Steelers and Jets — by a combined total score of 74-21. But, after a home overtime win over the Chiefs, the wheels began to come off the wagon, and the Patriots won just six of their next 13 games. If not for a complete Dolphins collapse in the regular-season finale, New England could very well have finished at 8-8.

This was from a team that just months earlier — with basically the same team in place, if not a worse one — had improbably beaten the NFL’s hottest team in the sport’s biggest game, on turf, no less.

All of a sudden, New England’s fans had to watch the likes of Indianapolis (a 41-0 loser to the Jets a week ago) and Cleveland (blowing a 24-7 third-quarter lead) take their team’s place in the NFL’s playoff tournament.

And with that absence from the post-season picture, the Patriots were relegated to "just another non-playoff team" status. Worse, they had proved the prognosticators right: they had been a fluke.

Most Vegas betting parlors had set the over/under number of 2002-’03 regular-season wins for the Patriots at eight; without the overtime miracle at Gillette Stadium on December 29, that line would have proven exactly right.

Everybody else was right about our team; we were all wrong.

Ever since Dallas and Denver collected consecutive Super Bowl titles in the1990s, there has been a number of teams that won just one championship and then fell back to earth. Can those teams also be regarded as "flukes"?

Let’s start with the 1997 Green Bay Packers team that beat New England in Super Bowl XXXI at New Orleans. They haven’t won a Super Bowl championship since, but they did get back there in the 1998 game, only to be upset by John Elway’s Broncos team. The Packers, led by future Hall-of-Famer Brett Favre, have been competitive and playoff-bound every year since ’97, so they can hardly be considered accidental champions, although they’ve certainly underachieved at playoff time each season since their last title (including 45-17 and 27-7 post-season losses over the past two years).

After the Broncos’ consecutive championships, the St. Louis Rams won their first, and thus far only, Super Bowl title in 2000. They were immediately stamped with a "future dynasty" label, but after losing in the first round of the 2001 post-season, St. Louis, as you may remember, advanced all the way to last year’s championship game. After that humbling loss, the team crashed and burned this past season, dropping its first five before finishing up at 7-9. When you look at it from that perspective, the Rams’ downward spiral makes New England’s recently completed season seem much less disappointing, especially for a team considered practically unbeatable only a year ago, and one that boasts a pair of perennial MVP candidates (Kurt Warner and Marshall Faulk). Nonetheless, the Rams’ legacy over the past three seasons has been impressive, and despite only winning that one Super Bowl title, St. Louis revolutionized the game and built a foundation of success during that three-year period.

Now we reach the only other team that can be considered in the fluke-like terms of New England’s Patriots: the 2001 Baltimore Ravens. After going 12-4 in the regular season that season (only good enough for a wild card, though), the Ravens beat Denver at home, and then took two consecutive road games (at Tennessee and Oakland) to reach the Super Bowl. Once there, they pummeled a good New York Giants team, 34-7, to capture the former Browns franchise’s first Super Bowl championship. A year later, despite its success, Baltimore dumped QB Trent Dilfer for Elvis Grbac, and while the Ravens still made the playoffs at 10-6 and even won at Miami in the first round, the team had definitely passed its peak. This past season, hobbled by key injuries, Baltimore struggled to a 7-9 record, and was a far cry from the team that won the title just 24 months earlier.

Whether history will remember the New England Patriots in the same terms as the Ravens — as a team of unknowns that sneaked up on everyone and won it on defense — or as a team that just got lucky for one year, one thing cannot be denied.

For one four-month period, when the world around us had changed so dramatically that NFL football provided a much-needed sanctuary from the horrors of terrorist attacks and war, the 2002 New England football team provided the best medicine to help us get through those difficult times.

When patriotism was needed, along with a feel-good story to help us forget our cares, that band of brothers shocked the NFL world with that long-ago last-second victory in the Big Easy.

We may never again hear owner Bob Kraft utter those immortal words — "We are all patriots, and tonight, the Patriots are Super Bowl champions!" — and hell, perhaps they were a fluke, but what really matters is that this team provided that memory in the first place. Whether they achieved it with breaks, flukes, or luck, how they achieved it is irrelevant.

With the conference-championship games looming this weekend, it is a memory that is rapidly fading — and in two weeks the moniker "defending Super Bowl champions" will be similarly erased — but a memory that nonetheless beats anything else in recent history.

So go cue up the DVD in the player once more to relive that glorious time, and then get ready for Sunday’s action.

And just because someone else is playing in the big game this year, don’t be sad; be glad.

We had our chance.

And we made the most of it.

Sporting Eye runs Mondays and Fridays at BostonPhoenix.com. Christopher Young can be reached at cyoung[a]phx.com