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What: “The Official Game Program:

Super Bowl XXXIII.”

Publisher: NFL Properties.

Price: $12.

Orders: (877) NFL-BOOK, or www.nflbooks.com

You know how more often than not the Super Bowl game has been a letdown?

That has never happened to the Super Bowl program.

It’s still the best, better and bigger than ever--240 pages of artful photography and writing by greats such as Jim Murray, Shirley Povich, Scott Ostler, Ray Didinger, Phil Barber, Bill Barron and Tom Barnidge.

Oh, the price. The tab is exactly what the most expensive seat sold for at Super Bowl I, when the program cost $1.

The best of this one is an insightful look into the heart, mind and family of a Miami icon, quarterback Dan Marino, by Scott Ostler.

Marino’s wife, Claire, told Ostler of a night he took her to a Rolling Stones concert at Pro Player Stadium. He sat on the ledge of their luxury box, feet dangling over the edge.

“Dan, don’t sit there, you could fall,” his wife told him.

Marino looked down at the 200-foot drop, then said to her: “I could take that hit.”

There’s also a collection of Super Bowl columns by Murray. Writing of Green Bay’s 35-10 conquest of Kansas City in Super Bowl I, Murray wrote this of the Packers that day: “The giant ate Jack and the beanstalk.”

There’s a delightful Barber Q and A with John Madden, presented with one of sports’ rarest photographs: Madden, in 1959, in a Philadelphia Eagle uniform.

More nuggets:

* The grass Super Bowl XXXIII will be played on was grown on a farm owned by golfer Greg Norman.

* The NFL leased 1,100 buses and 900 limousines for the game.

* After Super Bowl XXV, the New York Giants, having beaten Buffalo, 20-19, forgot something. They left their locker room without the 22-inch-high, silver Lombardi Trophy.

NFL Vice President Jim Steeg found it in a pile of discarded towels, drove it to the Giants’ hotel and gave it to General Manager George Young.