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.