HE CAN’T WAIT

He comes up the hallway at maybe one minute after 11, his head already full of the Jacksonville Jaguars and Sunday afternoon, the kind of Sunday that makes everything worth it for him, even daily meetings like this with the media.

Today Bill Parcells sees another overflow crowd pushing out the door leading to the Jets PR offices and says, “What, the ABL season is over?” One of the writers who is around the Jets all the time, not just for playoff games, says, “That’s either six times he’s used that line or seven, I’ve lost track.” The material gets old with Parcells, as old as he can look at this time of year. Games like today’s never do.

The crowd inside the impossibly cramped interview room--maybe the coach wants it to feel like a holding cell--tells him it is January, the weather outside, as clear and cold as ice, tells him the same thing. He comes up on the second Sunday in January, another team of his still here. People always talk about December with Parcells, but that is just an opening act with him. This is his season.

“You try to get players [for whom] the pressure’s not too much,” he says once he gets inside and starts talking.

We will find out about how some of these Jets, even the big talkers like Keyshawn Johnson, respond to the pressure today. And Vinny Testaverde, who has been in the playoffs before, though never on a team that had any kind of chance at the Super Bowl. We will see if they keep making the plays that have made the Jets as hot as anybody, or if somebody will make the kind of mistakes the Bills made on Saturday, the Packers made on Sunday. It can go either way.

“I see things happen [in these other playoff games] that cause a team to go home,” Parcells says.

Andre Reed bumps an official. Doug Flutie stands in the pocket so long in Miami he looks like he is trying to find a cab in the rain. Leroy Butler of the Packers, running right for Terrell Owens in Candlestick with three seconds left, suddenly veers off to his left and Owens gets a clear shot at the ball. The Packers go home. Flipper Anderson of the Rams got open in overtime against Parcells’ Giants one time and ran right through the end zone and out the tunnel at Giants Stadium.

Even coaches like Parcells watch helplessly as games end like that. There is only so much even the great ones can do. There is only one player on Tennessee who can kill Florida State in the Fiesta Bowl. Peerless Price, the receiver. Bobby Bowden, the Florida State coach, watches Price catch four balls for 199 yards and Bowden loses and Tennessee wins the national championship.

“[My players] see these games,” Parcells says.

He means, his players see that in January, one bad moment is the season.

He is two games away from another Super Bowl, but one of them is against the Jaguars, who were good enough to beat the Broncos in Denver in January 1997 when no one was supposed to be able to do that.

The Jaguars have a running back, Fred Taylor, who is good enough to beat you all by himself the way Terrell Davis does sometimes for the Broncos. The Jets will be favored and should be favored off the way they have played the last six weeks, but the idea that this game is some kind of gimme is nuts, even for the most breathless local boosters.

But say the Jets do win the game. Play the rest of this out. Give the Jets this game and then the upset of the Broncos. Make Parcells the coach who won a title for the Giants 30 years after their last one and now puts the Jets back in the Super Bowl 30 years after they were there with Namath. Whether he wins with the Jets or not. Then look back over the whole history of sports in New York and wonder if any coach or manager has ever looked bigger than Parcells would look two weeks from now.

There were all the famous managers who won a lot, Miller Huggins and Joe McCarthy, Stengel and Houk. Somehow there was the idea that they were supposed to win, as if they all had the kind of team Joe Torre had last year. Yogi Berra managed both the Yankees and the Mets to the World Series, lost in the seventh game both times. Leo Durocher, who went to the World Series with the Dodgers and then the Giants of ’51. Maybe that is the best way to look at Parcells. A Durocher of a football coach. Giving you that kind of lip.

Go ahead, play it out all the way. Give Parcells these two games. Already he is the first coach to take two different teams to the Super Bowl. What if he does it with three? What if he really does this with the Giants and the Jets?

Parcells knows this is the month that can change your life. He knows better than anybody. He can’t wait for today. The ABL season is over. His is just beginning.