A consumer’s guide to the best and worst of sports media and merchandise. Ground rules: If it can be read, played, heard, observed, worn, viewed, dialed or downloaded, it’s in play here.

What: Super Bowl web sites

Where: 1) www.sportszone.com/nfl/playoffs97/index.html

2) www.sportsline.com/u/football/nfl/superbowl/xxxii/index.html

3) www.sportsserver.com

How do you fill space in cyberspace?

Ordinarily, unlimited space is a good thing. No editors telling you to keep it short--we’ve got to get in those golf scores from Kuala Lumpur--and so the self-editing begins.

Excess has its price, however.

That cliche has become a painful reality on the web. Here, too much is too much when it comes to the no-news Super Bowl in San Diego.

Ordinary events take on extraordinary importance this week. If a San Diego television station’s helicopter hadn’t hovered over Denver’s practice for about 25 minutes Monday, what would the cyberscribes have done?

Written about El Nino?

(Never mind, that was already covered, somewhere, on the Super Bowl web coverage).

Bronco Buzz was the lead story at the sportsline.com and sportsserver.com. The ESPN folks had the helicopter fuss placed second, behind a piece about that wild and wacky Brett Favre’s penchant for practical jokes.

Another TV crew had the audacity to shoot some footage from the top of a nearby building, which was duly noted. Security forces were stationed in the hills surrounding the practice to halt interlopers unwise enough to approach by foot.

“I thought we were in Vietnam or something,” Bronco linebacker John Mobley said. “It looked like there must have been people hiding in trees.”

So that was Monday. Tuesday’s cyber-offering over at ESPN had a minute-by-minute chronicle of Media Day.

We won’t give away any secrets. But at least no one asked John Elway what kind of a tree he would be.