There’s Joy Only When Levy Breaks

3Com Park is melting in the dark, all the sweet green icing flowing down. The field is a swamp. The 49er season has sunk. The fans are wet and depressed. Their team doesn’t get to meet Denver in the Super Bowl, which, if you have ever met Denver in a Super Bowl, is enough to depress anybody.

San Francisco’s fans can’t figure out what went wrong. Rain or no rain, Jerry Rice or no Jerry Rice, how could a 49er team play an NFC championship game--at home--without a touchdown by the offense? What was wrong with Steve Young? William Floyd? Terry Kirby? Garrison Hearst? Brent Jones? J.J. Stokes? Ten points? Ten? Most of them on a 95-yard kickoff return?

“I wish I knew,” says a sorrowful 49er coach, Steve Mariucci, after a sorrowful excuse for a football game. “We hadn’t lost a game in 3Com all season.”

So what made this game different, coach?

“Field position,” he suggests.

Good suggestion. Having a home field doesn’t matter if you spend 3 1/2 hours trapped on your own side of that field.

Look at the way Sunday’s game begins: Chuck Levy--the guy who would run the 95 yards with 2:52 to go in the game--makes a nice runback of the opening kickoff. But teammate Chris Buckley blocks a Packer illegally, above the waist. The line of scrimmage for the 49ers’ opening possession is their own nine.

Their next possession begins at the 15.

The next at the 12.

“The field was messy. We were messier,” San Francisco linebacker Ken Norton Jr. says.

Every two steps a 49er takes forward, another 49er takes one backward. Young passes to Stokes for 43 yards, to the Green Bay 30. The rain stops. Next play, Young and flanker Terrell Owens fumble a handoff. Next play, Hearst gains nine yards to the Packer 28. Next play, Young’s pass to Jones is intercepted.

By the time San Francisco gets the ball back, Green Bay is leading, 10-0. And the rain is back.

Just before halftime, the 49ers muck things up again. Young passes to Floyd to the Packer 22? Kevin Gogan gets called for holding. Young runs for 14 yards? Kirby is called for holding. Young passes 48 yards to Owens on third down, to the Packer 10? OK, say 3Com’s comrades. A 49er touchdown is coming up now, for sure.

Young passes incomplete.

Young passes incomplete.

Young passes incomplete.

And all the injured Rice can do is stand on the sideline, raindrops falling on his burgundy 49er wool cap, shaking his head. San Francisco settles for a chip-shot field goal. Its offense never scores again.

A “genius” in the Bill Walsh mold or not, Mariucci is clueless what to do to get out of this mess.

His offense self-destructs. It doesn’t cross midfield in the entire second half [Levy’s kickoff return excluded]. San Francisco’s rushing total for the day is a net 33 yards.

“I love the guy,” Green Bay quarterback Brett Favre says later of Mariucci. “But I wanted to beat him bad.”

Bad, the 49ers are this day.

In the fourth quarter, they never move past their own 33-yard line.

Can this be the same San Francisco that defeated Denver in Super Bowl XXIV, 55-10? You remember that game. That was the 1990 one in New Orleans, where TV’s Terry Bradshaw got the Bronco quarterback, John Elway, so ticked off at him before the game, because of Bradshaw’s prediction that Denver could end up losing by some horrible score, “somethin’ like 55-3.”

That Terry, always exaggeratin’.

His prediction for Super Bowl XXXII? Stay tuned. He might have the Broncos giving up 60-something.

There has never been a Super Bowl between Denver and Green Bay, but there will be one Jan. 25 in San Diego. For the Packers, it is time to go from 3Com to Qualcomm. For the Broncos, it is time to return to the scene of the crime, after a 10-year run of “Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead.”

When they take the field in San Diego, it will be six days short of 10 years since Elway and the Broncos were drubbed by the Washington Redskins, 42-10, on the same field. The Broncs have been in four Super Bowls, but have scored more than 10 points only once. Can they score more than 10 against the Packers, when the 49ers couldn’t?

On dry land, maybe.

“I would have liked to see what we could have done against Green Bay on a field that wasn’t so wet,” Young says, with a staccato of rain drumming on a rooftop above him. “But then again, I suppose we could have ended up playing this game on Green Bay, on a sheet of ice. Wet or dry, they beat our butts.”

Can Denver beat Green Bay?

Young is so quiet, you can hear a raindrop drop.

“I wouldn’t count on it,” he says.