ooling a number of coaches, commentators and even full football teams since early September, the senile gang of Geritol-guzzlers known as the Oakland Raiders were finally unmasked and had their walkers pulled out from under them by a lightning-swift squad of relentless assassins that call themselves the Tampa Bay Buccaneers here Sunday in Super Bowl XXXVII.

The hapless Raiders turned off their hearing aids, took out their dentures, curled up and lay down together on the 50-yard line, happily playing Roman-era Christians to the Bucs' roaring lions. When the final gun sounded, the sky was rent, the sun became as sackcloth, and lo, the moon became as Al Davis' pompadoured head. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth among the Raiders' fans, and much cheering and ritual spilling of virgin blood from the fans of the Buccaneers. The final score was 487 to 13, but it wasn't really as close as all that.

Quarterback Brad Johnson, 12 and-a-half-year-old leader of the Tampa Bay eleven, completed over 800 passes, while 9-year-old wunderkicker Martin Gramatica booted so many field goals that the officials simply lost count and awarded the team a collective 212 additional points in the fourth quarter.

Commented 96-year-old wide receiver Jerry Rice, "What did you say? Did I take my medicine today? My granddaughter brings that fool-ass boyfriend of hers—he steals my stuff out of the garage. Huh? Who are you, anyway?"

Rice, who scored the only Raider touchdown on a 48-yard pass in the third quarter, became the oldest man to ever score a touchdown in a football game, let alone a Super Bowl. He was able to get open when two Tampa Bay defensive backs were caught out of position while giving the business to three of the "really cute" cheerleaders in the parking lot outside Qualcomm Stadium. Rice said he would have joined the defensive backs if only he'd seen the cheerleaders as well, but "I didn't have my distance glasses with me today. Besides, at my age, I need to tie a popsicle stick to it to get it to work anyway. Wait—who are you again?"

Wide receiver Tim Brown, a comparative youngster at age 88, and only slightly more lucid, added, "You know, we play them one game at a time. It's all right, we'll win next week." Reminded that the Super Bowl marks the end of football season, Brown responded, "The what? No, no, we play the Baltimore Colts next week, I'm sure of it. That Unitas fella, he's a tough bird. Did I take my medicine today?"

Ninety-three-year-old quarterback Rich Gannon: "We got jobbed by the refs on the coin toss. Did you see it? Everybody hates the Raiders, son. Everybody. Anyway, aren't we playing Sid Gillman's squad next week? We got to start planning for that game soon." Gannon set a record by having 37 passes intercepted and run back for touchdowns, 26 in the first half alone, and 16 other passes intercepted and mailed directly to various Tampa players' homes to be auctioned off for top dollar on eBay sometime in the next month.

"Huh? Maybe I'll bid on one of those," said Gannon, before he walked off the field aimlessly and was finally picked up in a bad neighborhood in Chula Vista, where he had been asking residents if they had seen his pajamas and whether or not he had taken his medicine that morning.

Defensive lineman Warren Sapp, a grizzled Buccaneer veteran at 16, had an amazing 73 sacks, 326 tackles and two hurries. He is known to his Tampa Bay teammates as "that raging fucking lunatic, watch out he doesn't get too close to you, he'll break both your legs and shatter a kneecap just as soon as look at you." When asked for a post-game comment, he began screaming gutturally and waving his helmet around him in a wide circle for close to twenty minutes, his eyes nearly bugging out of his head the whole time.

"Agga-ragga-wompona-wooo-hooo-haaa!! Whooo-ooo-eeeee sumbitch mothafuckin' sheeee-it bitch and a bastard god-DAYUM fuckin' ay!" he finally concluded. Asked for his assessment of the defensive plan, Sapp just muttered, "Fuck that, man, I'm dizzy," then said something completely unintelligible and threw up on NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue's tassled loafers.

Teammate Ronde Barber, a defensive back who will turn 14 next month, just shook his head at Sapp's antics and murmured, "At least he ain't got the rattlesnakes in his hands and his mouth this time. That's when he's really scary."

Asked if he could sum up the Bucs' strategy going into the game, Barber concurred with 11-year-old linebacker Derrick Brooks and head coach Jon Gruden, 20, that "The main thing was knees in the nuts from the word go, man, then slappin' them on they liver spots and talkin' shit about they grandchildren."

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Hey, Shorty, get me a glass o' buttermilk, will ya? Ah, thanks… nothin' like a nice cold glass o' buttermilk, no sir. Hey, I ever tell you the one about the milkman's boy? No? Well, listen up a spell…

You remember that ol' boy Floyd that used to deliver the milk, don't you? Long time ago. Guy was always pissed off at everybody, couldn't nobody talk to him for very long or he'd go off on 'em? You remember. Anyway, it turns out that ol' Cecil , who brings the milk now, is his son. I know, he's Moira's boy, rest her soul, and no, it didn't happen the natural way. Ol' Floyd was too mean and lowdown to ever spend enough time with a woman for that. And crazy Moira… well, you know I don't like to speak unkind of the dead. But anyway, here's what happened…

See, Floyd, he was always pissed off about something, like I said. And for a long time he held a grudge against Moira and her sister Penelope. Somethin' about 'em not givin' him a Christmas tip or some damn thing, I don't know. The thing was, he was in a position to do somethin' about his grudges if he wanted, and I guess he did, too. What I heard was that he used to take a bottle o' milk and get in the back o' the truck and whack himself, then he'd stick it in the bottle and get his duck butter all in there with the milk. He called it a "protein shake," and if you was on his shit list, pardon my French, you had to watch out that he didn't deliver you a protein shake with your regular order.

Well, I guess he had been givin' them ol' girls Moira and Penelope some o' them protein shakes for quite a while. And the way Penelope tells it, Moira didn't always use the milk to pour on her corn flakes. She said that if Moira coulda afforded it, she woulda bought enough milk to take a milk bath every morning. Now you know, them ol' girls wasn't rich, so Moira never did get enough milk at one time for that. Instead, she used to take one bottle each morning and wash her lady parts with it. Dutchy, I think they call it. So anyhow, turns out that she uses one or two o' them protein shakes and dutchies herself with 'em, and bingo, whaddaya think? Couple months go by and she realizes she's fragrant.

I'm tellin' ya, Shorty, no one in town could believe it, and not just because Moira and Penelope were about as ugly as monkfish left out to dry for a week. Thing was, they never had no truck with the men in this town, none of 'em. And they didn't have no truck with no men from no other towns, neither, far as anyone knew. They was suspected of being lebanese, to be perfectly honest.

That ol' Moira, though, she didn't try to hide it or nothin'. She said it was a sign from God, a whaddaya call it, one o' them unmasculate deceptions. She walked around town like she was givin' a watermelon a ride, just as proud as could be. Then when ol' Cecil gets born and grows up, whaddaya know, he's the spittin' image o' Floyd. Damnedest thing I ever heard, but it's one hunnert percent true. Ask anybody.

'Course now, Cecil, he's a little easier to deal with than ol' Floyd was, but that don't mean he don't got a temper. You just gotta stay on his good side, that's all.

Hey Shorty, you ever notice how chunky buttermilk gets sometimes?º more columns

"There was a time I remember when my old boss, a kind of megalomaniacal fruitcake with a bad head for business, approached me and asked me to go on a quest with him that could result in both of our deaths. This memory is pretty easy to conjure since it was about last week.

'Sampson,' the boss said, 'there is but one man on this staff I can trust to go along with me and, if necessary, make that ultimate sacrifice. And that man is you.'

I confess, some part of ol' Sampson L. Hartwig thought him out of his whack mind, as my hip-hop friends might suggest. But the more I dwelt on it, the more I took it as both a compliment and as an accurate assessment. The boss may be missing a few nuts and bolts, but as my dad used to say, even a broken clock is right twice a day, unless it's a digital.

What it comes down to for me, folks, is that Sampson L. Hartwig is an older fella in addition to being completely reliable. I've lived a long, happy life, and rightfully maybe it should be even longer, but it's a sad thought for a young person to go before they've had a chance to experience as much of the world as I have.

When I started writing down these sometimes-rambling musings of mine, I wasn't sure what the point of it all was. I later realized it was some attempt at immortality, I guess. Making my words stand up somewhere separate from me like carved in a stone statue. Or making them the most immortal of all things—stories. Passed down from one to the next over a nice cold drink in a cozy setting. That's the only way to live once you're in the ground, folks.

So the way I see it, yeah, let's go on this crazy adventure. The worst that can happen is they put me in the ground. There's still some part of me wandering around over those drinks in cozy settings, and in places like this column. And if it all works out for the better, maybe you'll hear from me again—and boy, will I have a humdinger of a story to tell you then.

In the meantime, I'm taking a loaded shotgun with me, and a taser. No one said I can't stack the deck a little in my favor. If my brother Goose comes nosin' around asking for me, tell him I went on a suicidal adventure—he'll be positively emerald with jealousy."

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