At 36, Favre knows how to push all the right buttons

	The Packers' Brett Favre threw three TDs in a 52-3 rout of the Saints on Sunday. AP
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GREEN BAY, Wis. -- I smell football.

Just as the combination of Fenway Franks, stale beer, grass and a combination of infield clay and other dirt means baseball to me, the smell of an October morning in Green Bay means football.

It's 8:15 on a nearly crystal-clear morning in northeast Wisconsin. I walk out of the Marriott Residence Inn and it hits me: perfect fall crispness, the first morning of visible breath escaping the mouth and the faint scent of paper-mill in the air. I think I've covered 34 games at Lambeau Field in my 22 years as an NFL writer. It's the place I'm probably most familiar with, other than my hometown Meadowlands, and to me, it's football.

In the parking lot of the hotel, I look two miles to the west. Lambeau. The only thing in the way of a perfect view is the Georgia-Pacific smokestack. Thus the paper-mill scent. Not overpowering. Just there.

At Lambeau, I do a lap of the parking lot. More smells of football. Coals burning, brats cooking, diesel belching. Crisp air as the overlay. And when the game starts, I feel football. It's just a great place. So much of this game is money-tinged. It's so good to come here and feel the game the way it's meant to be. "I will never play anywhere else,'' Brett Favre says.

I came here honestly expecting to be writing about the twilight of Favre's career, which of course we're into. The man turns 36 today. But in the column I wrote  for this week's Sports Illustrated, he addresses his short-term fate (no, there's no news about when he'll quit), and wonders if he still has it and if he can be the man to turn this team around. I'll let you read that after work on Thursday, or whenever the magazine gets to your mailbox.

For today, what really interested me out of the Pack's 52-3 win over the Saints was Favre's dynamic with Robert Ferguson. You may have seen what happened in the Monday night game a week ago. In the second quarter, trailing 16-7 and with the ball at the Carolina 29, Ferguson ran a post from the left side of the formation. He got his shoulder inside cornerback Ken Lucas, and Favre hit him in stride at the Panthers 21. But Lucas got his hands into Ferguson's midsection and wrestled the ball away, sprinting downfield with it. Two plays later the Panthers scored a touchdown. Instead of Green Bay maybe finishing the drive and going down 16-14 heading into halftime, Carolina now held a 23-7 lead. And so the ABC cameras followed Favre to the sidelines. They caught him barking at Ferguson. It looked like he said, "You gotta catch that ball!''

"When I got to the locker room after the game,'' Ferguson said, "I had like 30 messages from friends asking me, 'What's wrong with you and Favre?' That's when I knew TV made a big deal of it.'' "Look,'' Favre told me on Saturday, "I'm not an ass-chewer. I said to him, 'That's your ball, Fergy! You're strong! That's gotta be your ball.' The way things had been going for us, that's the kind of play that can make the difference in a game.''

Final: Carolina 32, Green Bay 29.