MANNING'S IMAGE GETS A BIG BOOST.

Byline: BILLY WITZ NFL 

Taking into account foul weather, Christmas debts, the comedown from holiday cheer and New Year's resolutions that are no longer resolute, a Welsh psychologist using a mathematical formula he developed determined that Monday was the most depressing day of the year.

The Manning family, for once, is not inclined to agree.

The NFL postseason has always been the post-traumatic season for the Mannings, for whom the playoffs has become a three-step process: pass the football, pass the remote, and pass the Prozac.

There was poor Archie, the patron Saint of football in New Orleans, who spent most of his 13-year career running for his life while the team he quarterbacked kept running into the ground. Not once did he make it to the playoffs.

Next to him in the family suite in the RCA Dome on Sunday was son Eli, who in three seasons has quarterbacked the New York Giants in two playoff games -- both of them losses.

It didn't look like they were having much fun, either, watching Peyton down on the field in what looked like another rerun of the same old story.

The CBS cameras caught the Manning family fretting and fidgeting early and often as the Colts fell behind, 21-3, after Asante Samuel returned an interception of Peyton for a touchdown.

The Colts rallied and tied the score, but then the Patriots answered back. So it went, back and forth, until Manning led them on an 80-yard drive to take their first lead, 38-34, with a minute to play.

As Peyton hid his eyes, said a few prayers and everyone who had seen this before prepared for Patriots quarterback Tom Brady to deliver another cruel twist, something unusual happened.

The other guy blinked.

When Marlin Jackson intercepted Brady, it was over, just like that. And, well, guess who's going to the Super Bowl?

Watching Manning wander across the field, shaking hands with Brady, getting congratulations from Tedy Bruschi and a brushoff from Bill Belichick, it was hard not to wonder: So this is what it's like when Wile E. Coyote catches the Roadrunner?

Manning had always played his part faithfully. There were occasional cracks in his character, such as the frustrations about protection problems against the Steelers a year ago and the shrug of the shoulders about not being able to play defense after a loss to Houston.

Yet, his pedigree notwithstanding, Manning has come across as human, which in his case always appeared to be a tragic flaw. He was Robo-QB, whose book smarts in the end are always betrayed by a lack of street smarts, but he'll come back again vowing to study a little harder.

``People almost always cheer for him because he's been the Little Engine That Could,'' said Paul Swangard, managing director of the University of Oregon's Warsaw Sports Marketing Center.

Of course, when your foil dates supermodels, is invited to State of the Union speeches and always wins The Big One, it doesn't take the sharpest tool on Madison Ave. to come up with a character who looks human.

So, we have a character whose charisma is based upon ... his lack of charisma. A character whose foibles make him just like the rest of us -- the piano movers who watch the piano roll down the street. They're not saying boo, they're saying mooo-vers. The guy willing to put on a toupee and fake mustache and tell you how good this Manning guy is.

And how's that for irony: the lucky guy who has it all is the former sixth-round draft choice, the guy who arrived at Michigan as the seventh- string quarterback, the one who couldn't start for his winless high school JV team.

Nevertheless, it's an image Manning has cashed in on. He has been in a half-dozen national advertising campaigns this season and earned $11.5 million in endorsements last year.

Winning, it appears, isn't everything.

``Sometimes mitigating circumstances, like being a class act, goes a long way when advertisers are looking for athletes who can consistently market and build their brands,'' said David Carter, a sports business professor at USC's Marshall School of Business.

If Manning goes on to lead the Colts to a Super Bowl victory, it probably won't lead to many more endorsements, Carter and Swangard said. As for how he's perceived, that could be another story.

John Elway and Steve Young saw their images burnished by long-sought Super Bowl victories, while Dan Marino -- if last year's dig by fellow broadcast partner Boomer Esiason was any indication -- still burns about not having one.

``I don't think he understands the impact,'' Young said in an interview last week. ``It's more than he can imagine. I knew it, then I won it, but I didn't realize it. It's a big, big deal.''

The Can't Win The Big One Club has been hit in recent years by mass defections.

Roy Williams, the best college basketball coach never to win a national championship, did just that two years ago at North Carolina. Larry Brown, the best coach never to win a NBA championship, did just that three years ago in Detroit.

The Red Sox and White Sox, the perennially cursed and the perennially crummy, have each won World Series trophies in our lifetime. And so did Tony La Russa, who hadn't won one since way back when Mark McGwire looked like a baseball player and not a chemistry experiment gone awry.

When the Steelers took the long and winding road to a Super Bowl victory a year ago, there was finally a happy ending for what had looked like a quixotic struggle for Bill Cowher and Jerome Bettis.

This doesn't appear to be a strictly American phenomenon, either. Italy, which had famously flamed out of the past four World Cups on penalty kicks or in extra time -- including the 1994 final at the Rose Bowl, when Roberto Baggio sent the final penalty over the crossbar -- reversed its curse. It won the Cup this summer -- on penalties, no less.

It's hard to say that Manning winning a Super Bowl, in this season and in this way, is any less expected.

But then anything seems possible, when even a day dubbed Blue Monday doesn't feel so blue.

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