You can't judge sports figured on victories alone

	It wouldn't be fair to shortchange Peyton Manning for all he's accomplished if he never wins a Super Bowl. Tom Hauck/Getty Images

We all know the famous charge attributed to Vince Lombardi: "Winning isn't the most important thing; it's everything."  But there really are degrees of victory, or what victory means.

For prime example, the Atlanta Braves. Fourteen times in a row they've won their division. An absolutely amazing stretch. But only once have they won the World Series. So, John Schuerholz, their general manager, must be the best in baseball. Bobby Cox is certainly among the best managers. But winning in the regular season doesn't mean anything anymore to the Braves. Why does anybody even bother to attend their games? Until they win another World Series, they're ... well, all right, they're not losers, but they're ... winning duds.

On the other hand, we have the Yankees. One of the great modern sports absurdities, repeated solemnly as gospel over and over by New York players, the media, the fans, is that if the Yankees don't win the World Series, the season is meaningless. Utter claptrap, balderdash ... and poppycock, too.

In fact, it's the reverse: the Yankees don't have to win anything. All they have to do is stay competitive, so that everybody jabbers about them and 4,000,000 fans pay their way into Yankee Stadium and millions more tune into their network and spend millions of dollars on Yankees memorabilia. The best soap operas just boil the pot; they don't have to cook anything. The Yankees are a potboiler first, a team second.

In football, the Indianapolis Colts have to win. They've been too glamorous and teased us for too long. It's also become the accepted wisdom that Peyton Manning is something of a paper tiger. The litany we hear now, is sure, Manning sets all sorts of records, but Tom Brady of the Patriots -- hey, he's a winner. In a team game like football, this makes for sophistry, but it's catching. The Colts better win it all, or they and Manning in particular will soon be branded as poseurs who can't win the big one.

But nobody has to win in the National Hockey League this year. Nobody. All everybody has to do there is show that the new rules make the game better. The NHL isn't a league this year; it's like a children's birthday party where the main idea is that everybody gets a prize. Winning isn't anything..

Mike Krzyzewski of Duke will apparently be named as coach of the U.S. basketball team for the 2006 World Games and the 2008 Olympics. He has to win. Must. No excuses. After all our failures in international basketball, all the angst, all the promises to get it right, Coach K has to get it right. And what makes it worse, once he does, everybody will just say ho-hum, we're supposed to win. You've heard of win/win situations. For Krzyzewski, this will be win/so-what.

On the other hand, does our soccer team dare win the World Cup next summer? They could, you know. They're in the top 10 in international rankings, and unlike virtually every other country in the world, because soccer isn't a life-and-death situation here, there's no great pressure on our guys.

But the team must think about the welfare of our nation. Most everybody already hates us so much for being so big and pushy. If we, who don't care a fig about soccer, actually won the World Cup from everybody who cares about it desperately, the United States would then be totally despised. We'd be the Klingons. We'd never get anybody in any of our coalitions ever again.