America at Large/George Kimball: The New England Patriots and the Philadelphia Eagles won't arrive in Jacksonville until Sunday, but the hot-button storyline for Super Bowl XXXIX has already begun to reveal itself.

Personally, let me say that I think the team with the Caucasian quarterback is going to kick the spit out of the team with the black one.

Then let me duck for cover.

The moment Donovan McNabb wound up in the Super Bowl, the first guy half the sportswriters in America tried to ring up was not Donovan's mother or his high school coach, but Rush Limbaugh. No sooner had McNabb led the Eagles to their 27-10 victory over the Atlanta Falcons in Sunday's NFC championship game than the nation's sporting pundits began to scour their rolodexes for Limbaugh's phone number.

Limbaugh, you may recall, is the conservative talk-show host who was dismissed from his job on ESPN's Sunday Countdown in the fall of 2003 in the wake of racially charged remarks he made on the air concerning McNabb.

Although the Philadelphia quarterback had already been voted by his peers to three Pro Bowls, Limbaugh, possibly in a drug-addled state, claimed that McNabb was "over-rated" because we who comprise the "liberal media" were so desperate for a black quarterback to succeed.

"I don't think he's been that good from the get-go," Limbaugh said at the time, and continued even as the ESPN switchboard began to light up with calls from irate viewers. "I think the media has been very desirous that a black quarterback do well . . . I think there's a little hope invested in McNabb, and he got a lot of credit for the performance of his team that he really didn't deserve."

It was a pronouncement so outrageous that Limbaugh was banished in disgrace from the airwaves, and he shortly wound up in a drug rehabilitation facility where he was sent to kick his Oxycontin habit. So what does he think of McNabb now?

"There's been a demonstrable change in McNabb's performance, pure and simple. I think he was motivated, inspired, by a whole lot of things," said Limbaugh, apparently too modest to add the words "including myself". But was Rush admitting he'd been wrong about McNabb?

"No," he said, but we in the media "were giving McNabb credit because there's this social hope. I've never wavered from that."

Here's the problem. McNabb and his Eagles are seven-point betting underdogs against the Patriots, and his New England counterpart Tom Brady is now 8-0 in career post-season starts after leading his team to a 41-27 thrashing of the Steelers at Pittsburgh's Heinz Field Sunday night. McNabb had led his team to three straight losses in NFL title games before finally winning one last weekend. But to suggest the Patriots enjoy a superiority at the game's most critical position now is to risk being lumped in with Limbaugh.

But this time around it was McNabb himself who injected the racial angle into the proceedings. A few days before the NFC Championship, where he faced off against Atlanta's Michael Vick (it was the first time in NFL history that two teams led by quarterbacks of colour had played for a conference title), McNair appeared at a press conference podium in Philadelphia and described the occasion as "a special weekend for myself, a special weekend for (Vick)." Why?

"Because this is an opportunity for an African-American quarterback to be represented in the Super Bowl. That hasn't happened since Steve McNair," said McNabb. "The larger meaning is that we've kind of stepped over the negative stepping stone of people saying that an African-American quarterback can't lead his team to a Super Bowl. This is kind of a new generation of quarterbacks that are able to do a little bit more than just sit in the pocket and pass the ball."

Last summer Jeremy Wariner became the first white American in 40 years to win an Olympic 400, but he didn't stand up in Athens and describe it as a " special day" for white people.

A hundred years ago it took Jack Johnson a decade to get a shot at the heavyweight title, but wouldn't a boxer in this day and age who went into a world championship match claiming to be fighting for his race be properly vilified? Steve McNair? It was only half a dozen years ago that McNair and the Tennessee Titans came within (take your pick) one second or one yard of winning a Super Bowl, and even he wasn't exactly a pioneer. Seventeen years have now elapsed since Doug Williams became the first black quarterback to start - and the first to win - football's ultimate game. It might have been remarkable then, but it shouldn't be in 2005.

In the days before Super Bowl XXII Williams was regarded as a genuine curiosity: A few days before that game one of my colleagues secured a place in the sporting version of Bartlett's when he asked Doug "How long have you been a black quarterback?" But in this day and age I can't think of many people, Rush Limbaugh included, who would find it astonishing that Donovan McNabb and his team are playing the Super Bowl. The perception against which Donovan is railing is for the most part a self-perpetuated illusion. Moreover, one could make the case that McNabb himself was perpetuating a racial stereotype by suggesting non-Afro-American quarterbacks (including Tom Brady) do "just sit in the pocket and pass the ball."

This past season six starting NFL quarterbacks were African-Americans, McNabb and Vick among them. Sixteen of 90 quarterbacks on NFL rosters were black. ¨ In other words, by now this ought to be a dog-bites-man story if ever there was one, and might it be yet, if only the principals didn't keep bringing it up.