Tony Dungy's career playoff record is 4-5. Eliot J. Schechter/Getty Images

You get the feeling, whether he was surrounded by rattlesnakes or reporters, Tony Dungy wouldn't budge an inch. Wouldn't so much as flinch.

There he was last Sunday afternoon in the bowels of Arrowhead Stadium, arms folded, with a satisfied but still largely stoic look written across his face. The Indianapolis Colts' second-year head coach was fielding questions and congratulations in about equal measure, and as always displaying his other-worldly equanimity.

If you stumbled upon this little informal gathering thinking Dungy just might do a little crowing about his AFC Championship Game-bound Colts, and how his own career fortunes have twisted and turned these past few years, well, you just don't know the man very well.

He doesn't do vindication. Dungy's so busy trying to get ahead, he has no time for getting even.

So we'll say it for him.

You want to feel good for somebody this weekend, as the NFL's final four square off with a trip to Houston on the line? Feel good for Tony Dungy, who a year ago right now was about to endure the mother of all mixed emotions: Watching the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, his Bucs, the team he resurrected from laughingstock status and took to the playoffs four out of six years, make a Super Bowl run for his successor, Jon Gruden.

No, the Bucs may not have won it all if Dungy was still in Tampa Bay last season. But I promise you this: If he hadn't been there from 1996-2001, Gruden wouldn't be flashing a Bucs Super Bowl ring these days either. Can there be any doubt of that?

You couldn't, of course, get those sentiments out of Dungy's mouth with a dentist's drill and truth serum. But he knows there are a certain amount of people out there who are hoping for a little poetic justice on his behalf. Hoping that he gets his Super Bowl close-up a year after he seemed to symbolize the guy who gets close, but never the cigar.

"I think a lot of people in Tampa Bay would be happy if I were to get there," Dungy said. "I've still got a lot of friends there, a lot of memories. ... But the only satisfaction is being one game from the Super Bowl. If we win next week, it'll be the greatest feeling in the world.

"I've got great memories from Tampa Bay, but I have great memories from Kansas City and Minnesota, too. I was in Pittsburgh. It's just a journey for me."

Dungy has friends everywhere, and it's not hard to understand why there are more than a few new Colts fans being created every week. Every once in a while, we all need a good guy to finish first. Just to show that it can happen. Just to prove that life can on occasion be fair.

In the NFL, the good guy line starts with Dungy, who has never once bemoaned the shoddy way his Tampa Bay tenure ended, or wondered aloud what might have been in 2002 had he been given the opportunity to remain with the Bucs.

When Tampa Bay made it to San Diego last January, Dungy kept his head high, kept smiling, and wouldn't play along with anyone who wanted him to fill the role of the jilted former coach. It wasn't his team any more, he said, again and again. It was Gruden's, and he had no claim to the credit that went with the Super Bowl title.

"I never took any satisfaction in that," Dungy said. "I was happy for some of the players, [Derrick] Brooks and [John] Lynch and Karl Williams and [Mike] Alstott. But every year is a different year, a different team."

Even now, with his Colts playing at a mind-boggling pace on offense, Dungy is wary of those who want him to want vindication. We'd love it if he looked right into the camera and dedicated this year's playoff run to Bucs owner Malcolm Glazer and sons, who lied to him in bald-faced fashion while they were courting Bill Parcells in late-season 2001, but he's not about to. He's not going to start defending himself and his record now, when he wouldn't even do it two years ago, at the height of his disappointment in Tampa Bay.

Asked last Sunday if his first back-to-back postseason victories proved his reputation as a winning coach, Dungy smiled that familiar smile and took the high road. But then, the man doesn't even know there's an alternative route.

"I think your reputation as a coach gets better the better you players are," said Dungy, in full credit-deflection mode. "We've got some great players and that makes me a better coach. For these last two weeks anyway."

Dungy, of course, has been here before. This isn't his first appearance on the conference-title game stage. Four years ago, his Bucs won their way to the NFC title game, where they had the equally daunting task of facing those 1999 Kurt Warner-led St. Louis Rams, who went on to capture the Super Bowl trophy.

Tampa Bay, led by its defense, had a lead deep into the fourth quarter, but lost 11-6, coming just one play shy of upsetting the conference's No. 1 seed. The task will be similar in this Sunday's AFC title game, as the visiting Colts (14-4), led by their offense, find the top-seeded New England Patriots (15-2) standing between them and a trip to Houston for Super Bowl XXXVIII. This time, a conference title-game appearance won't do.

"Our mission is to win a Super Bowl," Dungy said. "And we know we've got a very, very tough team in front of us. New England has won about 13 straight and they're playing the best ball of anybody in the league. Going up there is going to be tough. We know what the challenge is, but we're not going to be satisfied just getting to the championship game. We think we've got a team that can win it."

If you believe in such a thing as karma, Dungy and the Colts might have it on their side this postseason, given that Dick Vermeil's Rams beat Tampa Bay in the 1999 NFC Championship, but Dungy repaid the favor last week when Indianapolis upset Vermeil's Chiefs.

"No, that doesn't make up for 1999," said Dungy, who improved his playoff record to 4-5 with last week's 38-31 win at Kansas City. "Now, if this had been the championship game, then me and Dick would have been square."

As hard as it is to believe, and as long as he had to wait for his first NFL head coaching opportunity, Dungy is already an eight-year veteran of the head-man-in-the-headset crowd. He has been a playoff coach in six of those seasons, and has had just one losing year, his first in Tampa Bay.

But with one more win, Dungy won't be just one of this year's two Super Bowl coaches. He'll have the added distinction of becoming the first black coach to lead a Super Bowl team. If the football gods were waiting to bestow that honor on the perfect role model of a man, then the timing seems perfect.

"Someone asked me about that," Dungy said in Kansas City. "You really don't think about it until you get to the championship game. It's in the back of your mind, but we had to win against Denver, and we had to come here. It's something that hasn't been done before. You wish it weren't an issue, but it will be talked about.

"If I get there, I'll think about Lionel Taylor and Sherman Lewis and Jimmy Raye, coaches who could have gotten to the Super Bowl if they had had an opportunity. I hope I get there because it will be a tribute to those guys."

Leave it to Dungy to be the one to think of those coaching pioneers who came before him, honoring their place in the game. We won't have much time for that any way. We'll be too busy feeling happy for him, and his place in the game.

Don Banks covers pro football for SI.com.