The Vikings are prepping themselves to reach the NFC Championship Game for the first time since the 2000 season and maybe play in a Super Bowl for the first time since Sammy White was a rookie, and of all the questions that can be asked about this team, the most intriguing is the one Dr. Phil might posit:

If Brett Favre and Brad Childress led the Vikings to their first Super Bowl victory, how would you feel?

As recently as two years ago, Favre might have been the only human hated more by Vikings fans than Childress. Favre was enjoying his renaissance season during his 16th year in Green Bay, proving irremovable as house mold, and Childress was still being stalked by fans holding play charts over their faces.

To suggest in 2007 that Favre and Childress could someday combine forces -- in the way that Superman and your high school biology teacher might join forces -- to win a championship that eluded Fran Tarkenton and Bud Grant, well, that would have been as silly as predicting the Gophers football team would receive a new stadium before the Vikings.

I asked Mr. Childress (only Favre gets to call him Chilly now) about he and Favre teaming to make Vikings fans as happy as they'll allow themselves to be. "It's ironic, isn't it?" Childress said.

Vocal Vikings fans have been ranting about Childress for so long that they're having trouble giving him credit for running an 8-1 team with an explosive offense. Monday, after he finished a news conference in which he rightly needled me for all the times I've teased him, I asked Childress if he wants to be popular here.

"You can't worry about that," he said. "It's kind of like I tell my kids -- it's not a popularity contest. I'm your Dad. I'm not trying to be your friend."

How do people treat him these days? "Typically, I'm going to get people coming up to me who are positive," he said. "They all have a story about Metropolitan Stadium, or having season tickets forever. Usually, the criticism, that's for the blogosphere. In East Coast parlance, that's for the miserable [people] who talk back and forth to each other.

"I typically am approached by people who like what you stand for, and what you brought here, and like how it's going. But you know, my mother puts herself through the pain of looking at those coach's polls that rise and fall usually on a weekly basis."

Even after taking the Vikings to the playoffs last season, Childress found himself near the bottom of some NFL polls this summer. Fans have been slow to warm to him even as the Vikings have surged.

Childress doesn't worry about it. He coached in Philadelphia, perhaps the rudest, most obnoxious sports market in America. "It's 'What have you done for me lately?'" Childress said. "It's week to week. It's seasonal work."

Fellow Eagles coaches would tell Childress that popularity wasn't defined game to game so much as series to series. "It's true," Childress said. "They want that satisfaction every series. If they don't get it twice in a row, they're going to be like, 'Grrrrrrrrrrrrr.'"

Childress has become increasingly gregarious since his first season, during which he assumed a gruff facade. He still has his temper, though.

If you meet Childress at a social function, and you notice him playing footsie with his wife, you have just crossed the threshold from "Mildly Annoying Person Who Won't Leave Me Alone" to "Biggest Waste of Time Since Facebook."

"My attitude is that I'm going to listen to your story, on the rare time I'm out," he said. "I listen to the stories about, 'My Dad took me to the Met,' and 'I've had season tickets for so long,' and I'll nod, and then they'll get into football, and they might give me a 'How come?' question, and then we might get to a point where it's just too much.

"I'll say, 'Yeah, is that right?' and my wife will step on my foot to try to get me moving, but I might just say, 'Well, what do you do for a living?'

"I've had everything from a guy in Philadelphia telling me 'I'm a mortician' to doctors and every other walk of life. With the mortician, I said, 'I don't know the first thing about embalming science or the price of a casket, but you know what? It's amazing how everyone knows what I freaking do, and I spend 18 hours a day at it.'

"I have no problem flipping it around on them. You want to go, I can go."

I wrote a long time ago that I liked Childress because he can take a punch. He's gotten lambasted -- sometimes fairly, sometimes not -- for three years. He's been teased and caricatured, and he's taken all of it with a grace and sense of humor rarely found in the NFL.

But he has his limits. Just because you're a mortician doesn't mean he wants to hear your theories on the coffin corner.

Jim Souhan can be heard at 10-noon Sunday, and 6:40 a.m. Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday on AM-1500. His Twitter name is SouhanStrib. jsouhan@startribune.com