HOUSTON - The towels. They all remember the towels. Brentson Buckner, a Bengal but one season, 1997, said drying himself with a Bengal-issue towel was like drying a Cadillac with a do-rag. What am I supposed to do with this? Blow my nose?

"You got grown men, 300- (pounds) plus, and you got to dry off with a towel as big as this," said the 310-pound defensive lineman. He gestured toward a note pad. "It was archaic," Buckner decided.

There are things that are funny and things that are really funny. Funny was Jay Leno, leading the Tonight Show with a Bengals joke. Really funny was watching Brentson Buckner try to dry his newly showered, side-of-beef self with a notepad-sized towel.

Sometimes, Buckner said, "they ran out" of towels. On those occasions, Buckner retired to the sauna. Eventually, veteran that he was, Buckner wised up. "I started bringing towels from home," he said.

Buckner is a starter on the Carolina Panthers team that on Sunday will play football for the championship of the world. He's a member of a front four that is being called the best in the NFL. After showering now, he has "towels galore," he says. Which shows you how quickly things change in the NFL.

Two years ago, the Panthers were 1-15 and had so many players in trouble, or victims of it, they could have hosted an episode of Law & Order. A rousing 21,070 fans attended their last home game that year. Many covered their heads in bags.

Not much further back than that, the Bengals practiced at Spinney Field, under the malodor of a barrel-making plant - "the awful-est smell in my life," Buckner allowed this week - and distributed do-rag towels to 300-pound men. Now, they're in a new, taxpayer-paid palace and have gone from 2-14 to 8-8 in one year. Which can mean only two things:

(1) Big towels for everyone!

(2) The Bengals will be in the Super Bowl next year.

"It's our turn," Chad Johnson said Thursday. He was in California, working out with his personal trainer, preparing for the Pro Bowl. "We're not far off right now. Every decision Mike Brown and Marvin (Lewis) have made has elevated us. The sky's the limit next year."

This is something you'd expect Johnson to say. But really, given the way the league is, who can argue?

If you live in Little Market Land, you have to love the socialist, anyone-can-grow-up-to-be-president National Football League. The NFL changes faces quicker than Michael Jackson. As Carolina wideout Steve Smith noted Thursday, "In this league, nobody cares what you did last year."

The New England Patriots, Carolina's opponent Sunday, are one Super win from being labeled a "dynasty." The Pats will have won two Bowls in three years. Twenty-four hour viruses have longer dynasties.

In the NFL, unless you are completely and willfully incompetent - and we know what that looks like - you can go from pumpkin to carriage faster than you can say "Jake Delhomme." League geniuses - coaches and general managers - would have you believe such a leap requires Einstein IQs and 20-hour workdays.

What it really requires is luck, karma, chemistry, being on a roll and having a quarterback who won't screw it all up. It might be hard. But it ain't complex.

Want an extreme makeover? Have a plan. Have everyone believe in it. Don't stray from it. Have big towels.

"We'll probably be there next year," Chad Johnson said.

Can you imagine Chad on Super Bowl Media Day? Three thousand media heathens from around the globe? Minicams aimed to give him a 21-gun salute? The Chad Bowl. Oh, my.

"It wouldn't be fair," Johnson said. "It'd be better than the Oscars. It'd be like the president addressing the nation. I'd have to do something different. It can't be normal. That wouldn't be Chad."

That would be the Bengals, though. Carolina overcame worse. In the NFL, no team asks Why. They all ask, Why Not? Even in Cincinnati.

E-mail pdaugherty@enquirer.com.