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PHOENIX - Cardinals defensive end Bryan Robinson took a quick glance at the horde of media gathered around his locker yesterday and donned a Magic Johnson-like grin.
"It's a little surreal that we're talking about the Arizona Cardinals right now," he said. "You guys look like you're sleepwalking. You don't even know what to do. 'What kind of questions do I ask?' "
Surreal. Shocking. No adjective is too extreme to describe this season's Cardinals, who have somehow broken what most Phoenicians believed to be an unbreakable mold. Now they are preparing for the NFC championship game against the Eagles this Sunday.
Since arriving in Arizona in 1988, the Cardinals had posted exactly one winning season and one postseason victory before this year, while employing seven head coaches.
If you had polled the Phoenix region's 4 million-plus residents in December on the motto most likely to be associated with this team, "Same Old Cardinals" would have won in a landslide.
Perhaps that's why it took the efforts of a couple of local companies to ensure that a first-round playoff game against Atlanta was a sellout by buying a few thousand tickets after the NFL granted the team a later deadline.
"There was a little bit of a lag before our last playoff game because people weren't sure about tickets and what was going to happen, and obviously we didn't play well leading up to it," coach Ken Whisenhunt said of the team's late-season swoon. The Cardinals (11-7) lost four of their final six contests, and three of them were blowouts.
One of those games was a 48-20 loss to the Eagles on Nov. 27 when the Cardinals had to travel East three days after playing the New York Giants in a physical game at University of Phoenix Stadium in Glendale. But the game most players point to as the low point of the season was a 47-7 loss at New England one week before the end of the season.
"Any time you look at a team putting that many points on you, you have to ask yourself what you're doing wrong," defensive tackle Darnell Dockett said. "We let a lot of people down; it was one of those things. We learned from it and didn't point the finger or anything. We just came back to work and it was over with."
Since then, the Cardinals have displayed a running game that no one thought would materialize. A once-maligned secondary has picked off seven passes in two playoff games, and an offensive line once dubbed "the Big Red Lie" has produced a 115-yard-a-game rushing average while quarterback Kurt Warner has been sacked just once.
With the Cardinals one game away from a Super Bowl berth, the Phoenix area may finally be catching fire. On Sunday, the remaining tickets for the NFC championship game sold out in six minutes.
But that doesn't mean the Cards have shed their loser label just yet. The oddsmakers have made the Eagles three-point favorites, and national pundits are mostly in agreement.
The Cardinals are OK with that perception. When asked if his team was finally going to get some respect, running back Tim Hightower said: "I hope not. We've been playing really good with all the doubters and being the underdogs."
Whisenhunt agreed.
"Four weeks ago, when our team wasn't playing as well as it could, a lot of people were taking shots, and they're still taking shots and that's fine," he said. "That's the great thing about the playoffs. You get in and you never know what can happen.
"But I think at times this year we've shown that we were a team that was going to be capable of playing at [this] level. I'm not surprised. That was the plan. That's why you do it, right?"
