02/04 — Maureen McGovern sang that there's got to be a morning after. And so it was one morning after Super Bowl XLII that the NFL wrapped up its activities for its 2007 season today with its traditional 8:30 a.m. news conference featuring the commissioner, the game MVP and the winning coach.

I won't dwell on the Giants' 17-14 win over the Patriots much more, but two final points struck me about the last remarks of the season delivered by Eli Manning and Tom Coughlin. One is that I've heard a lot of the sentiments before.

"We've learned to deal with adversity, overcome our mistakes and bad plays. No matter what's thrown at us, we can handle it," Manning said. And after leading one of the biggest upsets in NFL history and winning the MVP trophy in the process, he said, "I feel I've got to become a better quarterback. I've got to do it over a whole season and cut down on my mistakes."

Then Coughlin talked more about his team's success.

"Our players bonded together to become the true definition of 'team,' " the Giants coach said. And "Penalties lose games." And then a reminiscence about his Big Blue assistant coaching days under coach Bill Parcells and GM George Young: "The thing that always struck me was the way they approached peaks and valleys — they didn't want any of those."

So much of this applies to every team in the league, of course. So much of this applies to head coach Eric Mangini's Jets.

Always strive to get better? Mangini preaches doing something better every day. No penalties? The Giants were sixth, the Patriots tied for seventh in fewest yellow flags this regular season; the Jets were second. No peaks and valleys? The most important thing is the next day, the next week, the next game.

There are no guarantees, but the Jets have so many traits of the best teams, the playoff teams. They have needs, as all teams do, but it's close to time to address them in all the ways available to NFL outfits.

And they didn't need any specific trigger to tell them they wanted to be here — the three Jets players I saw this week, Leon Washington, Jerricho Cotchery and D'Brickashaw Ferguson, all said the same thing. But if their stadium mates the Giants can be a further trigger, so be it. Why not the Green & White in 2008?

The other eerie sensation is that of the breaking down of the Super Bowl venue. I walked all around University of Phoenix Stadium in the hours before Sunday's opening kickoff, and the buzz was loud and mounting. Ticketholders came from all over the Valley of the Sun to meet here, eat here, drink here, shout, cheer and moan here for the week's raison d'etre.

The great game was played, then people and confetti were all over the field. Then I hopped onto the media bus for the half-hour ride from Glendale, Ariz., back to downtown Phoenix. Guess what. It was gone. Not Phoenix. The Super Bowl.

The partiers with their hats and shirts and buttons, out in the streets behind the barricades that closed a number of streets to traffic, were gone. The barricades were gone. The traffic cops on every corner? Gone. The streetsweepers were already out at midnight, scouring the streets for the next business day. I tried to buy a $25 Super Bowl scorpion plush toy at 1 p.m. today. "Sorry, the cash register's closed," I was told.

At the media center in the convention center's basement, Radio Row, bustling with the big names of the NFL past and present being interviewed by the big names of American sports radio days before, was cricket city. The media workroom, filled with tables and draped cubicles, was barren.

"We're already talking about tearing it down," Daniel, a convention center employee, said in the elevator Friday. "We're just well-paid carnival workers."

True enough. The circus came to town. And what a circus it was. And now the circus is gone (and me with it when my plane lifts off from Sky Harbor Airport on Tuesday morning).

But as transitorially sad as the NFL circus leaving town might be, the train will pull into another town, specifically Tampa, Fla., next year. And the sadness should be replaced with hope for all teams.

As Coughlin, the new expert on how to win a Super Bowl, said, "I tell the players it's good to dream and visualize." The Jets' dreaming and visualizing are already well under way.