By Mike Lopresti
Gannett News Service

INDIANAPOLIS - It could have been different, of course. The Indianapolis Colts could be the San Diego Chargers today, out of sight and out of mind, and probably on the golf course.

All it would have taken was one wrong twitch that draft day in 1998. A No. 1 choice to make, and two ballyhooed quarterbacks to choose from. The Colts could have been headed for disaster as fast as you can say "Ryan Leaf."

Instead, they called Peyton Manning. He's the one keeping the New England Patriots' defensive staff up at night. The one who could throw a pass through a cornfield and not hit an ear.

"You're at the mercy of the fates," said the general manager who drafted him.

Bill Polian was talking Thursday about how trying to glue together a contender amid the modern NFL rules - "Our salary cap doesn't forgive and it doesn't forget" - is like working with a hand grenade.

"If you miss on that decision," he said of Manning, "you're set back a long, long way.

"But I truly don't look back on it."

Oh, but he should. Polian is an accomplished and sometimes cranky personnel guru who built a team in Buffalo that went to four straight Super Bowls. But he's never made a more important judgment in his football life than the day he took Manning instead of Leaf, when so many were suggesting it should be the other way around.

"All the things written about (Manning before the draft) were totally wrong," he said. "He doesn't have a weak arm, he's not frail, he's not a product of the season.

"He's far more physically gifted than people have been led to believe."

The Colts played in two of the NFL's landmark postseason games. They won the famous 1958 sudden-death championship against the New York Giants and lost Super Bowl III, melting away as historic upset victims - as Joe Namath guaranteed all along.

But all that was with Baltimore as their first name.

The Indianapolis Colts have never had a truly defining moment. There is no centerpiece to their legacy, save for how they were moved here one night in secretly scheduled trucks, like a gold shipment or toxic waste.

But never an Ice Bowl. Never The Drive. Or The Catch. No Indianapolis game owns a nickname.

Maybe a Manning-engineered Super Bowl trip would change all that.

"That's a question that both an historian and a detached observer can answer better than I," Polian said. "We truly are inside a cocoon. I can't answer that because I'm worried about how we're going to keep this team together."

Polian understands how hard it is to get to a Super Bowl. "Next to impossible. Because so many things have to go right."

And also what it means to a franchise to get there. "It puts an indelible mark on the people who are part of it."

So here are his Colts. They have a quarterback who is putting on a January rendition of Joe Montana. A quiet and dignified man, Tony Dungy, who could be the first black coach ever to lead a team to the Super Bowl.

They have a receiver who torments defenses with the body of a pencil, and a punter who hasn't punted yet in the playoffs.

They can claim being Most of America's Team, because they're the only NFL survivor left west of the Appalachian Mountains.

It is all the handiwork, partly, of a draft day call six years ago. Who knew then what a crossroads it was? From there to this Sunday, when the Indianapolis Colts have a chance to be somebody. A Super Bowl team. A franchise all grown up.

Mike Lopresti is a columnist for Gannett News Service.