Cardinals go from joke to NFC champions

I’m trying to write these eight words, nobody has written them before, nobody has even considered anything like them in decades, and it’s hard.

There is confetti caked to my shoes, a hugging player’s sweat on my notebook, an insistent roar filling my ears, thousands of waving white towels blinding my eyes, and the wonder of tackle Deuce Lutui stuck in my brain.

Moments after his team won the NFC championship game here Sunday, Lutui pulled his family out of the stands and stared at them as if they had all just landed on Mars.

“Are you serious?” he asked them. “Are we really here? Did we really just do this?”

I’m trying to write these eight words, and Lutui’s teammates also brought their families to the field, everybody was crying and dancing and posing for photos, kids at a commencement, believers at a revival.

Officials were trying to move them off the grass, but they wouldn’t budge, nobody wanted to go to the locker room, nobody wanted to discover this was all just a dream.

But it’s not. And, so, well, I’ll try.

The . . . Arizona . . . Cardinals . . . are . . . in . . . the . . . Super . . . Bowl.

There. Really.

It’s as verifiable as the 32-25 score that blinked around University of Phoenix Stadium late Sunday afternoon while the losing Philadelphia Eagles staggered home under its odd glare.

It’s as sincere as the wide-eyed look on the face of Cardinals safety Antrel Rolle as he stared into stands filled with red-clad people who wouldn’t stop cheering and wouldn’t go home.

“I’ve never seen people like this before, I never seen anything like this before,” he said. “Miracles happened here today. That’s the only explanation. Miracles.”

There are perhaps better words for this, but none immediately come to mind.

Arguably the worst professional sports franchise in this country’s history is going to be a participant in its biggest sporting event.

The oldest continuously run pro football franchise in the country will have a chance to win its first championship in 61 years, and its third championship in 110 years.

An organization so cheap it once charged players the Federal Express cost of mailing their contracts is playing in the richest sporting event in the country.

A team so poorly run it once gave players only one pair of socks per season is playing in the most popular sporting event in the country.

The Arizona Cardinals are in the Super Bowl.

They once lost 29 games in a row. They once lost the keys to their workout facility during Joe Montana’s free-agent visit, and he never came back.

They once threw a game-winning touchdown pass on the final play of the final game of the 2003 season . . . and the victory cost them the No. 1 overall draft pick.

They once had to use a silent snap count because the stadium was filled with the angry roar of an opposing crowd . . . during one of their home games.

In the last 24 years, they have had a winning record twice.

In one memorable moment late in a game several years ago, safety Lorenzo Lynch broke his face mask and ran to the sidelines for some tape, only to discover that the tape had already been loaded on the bus.

The Arizona Cardinals are in the Super Bowl.

“Keep hating!” shouted nose tackle Bryan Robinson as he stalked off the field. “Everybody, go on, keep hating us!”

I’m not hating, I’m loving, this team, this story, and certainly Sunday’s game, when the Cardinals and their priceless antique quarterback Kurt Warner ran off to a 24-6 lead with five minutes left in the third quarter.

It was fun, a flea-flicker touchdown, big hits, the Cardinals were rolling . . . and then, just as quickly, they became the Cardinals again, giving up three Eagles touchdowns in 8:23 of clock time, falling behind 25-24 with 10:45 left.

“Yeah, I was nervous,” Rolle said. “Around here, we’re always nervous.”

It was up to Warner and the offense, one more time for the aging former Super Bowl champion who had been picked off football’s trash heap, one more time for the team that championships forgot.

“‘You would think we would be tight in the huddle, but it was just the opposite,” Lutui said. “Kurt looked at us and said, ‘OK, we’re minutes from the Super Bowl. No, no, we’re seconds from the Super Bowl.’ ”

Turns out, they were 14 plays and 72 yards from the Super Bowl, with running back Tim Hightower converting a fourth down at midfield, then catching a third-down screen pass on the eight-yard line and bowling over Quintin Demps at the goal line for the winning touchdown.

“I always say, if our offensive line can get rid of the first seven guys, shoot, I can always run over a safety,” Hightower said. “I knew I had to score. We had no choice.”

Once he did score, Hightower ran off the field as if dazed.

“I was speechless,” he said, speaking for a nation.

Then, it was the Cardinals’ defense that couldn’t talk, hunkering down to stop Donovan McNabb one more time. On a fourth-down incompletion deep in Cardinals territory, cornerback Roderick Hood became tangled up with receiver Kevin Curtis, who then dropped a pass as he fell to his knees.

The Eagles cried interference.

“Well, something caused me to fall,” Curtis said.

The Cardinals cried something else entirely, a word you’ve heard before here, a word you’ll no doubt hear throughout Super Bowl week.

“It was one of those miracles,” Hood said. “Today, they were all ours.”

The Arizona Cardinals are in the Super Bowl.

Who knows, if I keep writing it, maybe I’ll actually believe it.

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bill.plaschke@latimes.com