It’s a Moment They Can’t Forget --or Can They?

Jim Steeg has been the NFL’s vice president of special events for the last 20 years, and no NFL event is more special than the Super Bowl.

Steeg’s favorite Super Bowl moment came after a game.

“It was walking into the locker room the last time we played in Tampa [1991] and discovered the New York Giants left without taking the trophy,” he said.

Steeg picked up a phone in the locker room and called George Young, New York’s general manager at the time. “I couldn’t resist asking him, ‘Missing anything, George?’ ” Steeg said.

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An omen? Young is in Tampa as the NFL’s vice president for football operations, 10 years after the Giants beat Buffalo, 20-19.

His hotel room number this week: 2019.

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Space invasion: Having the Super Bowl basically in his backyard was hard enough. Then Tampa Bay linebacker Derrick Brooks saw an even more frustrating sight this week.

Making a trip to the Buccaneers’ practice facility, Brooks realized how far removed his team was from the big game.

“It really hit home with me when I got stuck in the parade of Giants coming in and saw somebody in my locker,” Brooks said. “It really [ticked] me off. But it was Micheal Barrow, and he’s a good friend of mine, so I just told him, ‘Don’t leave anything.’ ”

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No MTV fan: Tony Kornheiser of the Washington Post said the “dopiest” event he covered Super Bowl week was a news conference for the halftime show featuring ‘N Sync and Aerosmith.

Wrote Kornheiser: “They are providing the halftime music along with Britney Spears [who was unable to attend the news conference, presumably because she was in the shop having some additional body work], Mary J. Blige and something called Nelly. [Nelly? Don Nelson sings?]

“I admit I don’t know much about ‘N Sync. They’re five scruffy ragamuffins who look like they’re playing hooky from vocational school. I can’t tell them apart from the Backstreet Boys, who, by the way, are singing the national anthem.”

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Long and winding road: How did Giant receiver Ron Dixon get here?

A highly touted recruit in 1993 at Wildwood High, about 80 miles north of Tampa, Dixon didn’t have the test scores to play at a four-year college. So he spent two years at Itawamba (Miss.) Community College, then briefly attended West Georgia before ending up back home for two years because of poor grades. He got a job at a gas station that included scrubbing toilets.

He finally enrolled at Lambuth University, an NAIA school in Tennessee, and was drafted by the Giants in the third round last April.

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Half bad: There’s nothing like a Super Bowl halftime show, particularly from a player’s standpoint.

“First you sit around,” Randy Cross, a former San Francisco 49er lineman and now a CBS analyst, says of the long break. “Then when they decide to let you out there, you have to stand off to the side while they move stages and floats and all sorts of other crud out of the way.

“If you’re lucky, it’s outdoors. Because if it’s indoors, there’s smoke and everything else from the fireworks.”