SAN DIEGO - Old players are the reason we keep returning to the games we love. Young players make us wish we hadn't.

In one La Jolla, Calif., hotel ballroom about 10 miles north of downtown San Diego, Tampa Bay Buccanneers wide receiver Keyshawn Johnson says this:

"No matter what you say about Keyshawn Johnson, at the end of the day you're going to have to give him his just due."

In another La Jolla hotel, a mile from the first, Oakland Raiders wide receiver Jerry Rice says this:

"This is the opportunity of a lifetime for me."

Can you tell who's 40 and who's 30?

Rice has three Super Bowl rings. His hairline recedes, not his perspective. Johnson, with no rings, wears a backward visor.

Rice has 1,000 more career catches than Johnson, who wrote a book called Throw Me The Damned Ball. Rice would never do that. It'd be redundant.

"If I wasn't exciting, you'd say I was boring," Keyshawn says. "I'm not asking you to talk to me. If you don't give me any more ink, I don't care."

Says Rice: "I get up with the same focus every day. I still go out and work hard."

Maybe in his younger days, Rice hipped to arrogance and hopped to self-absorption. I don't remember that. Neither does he.

When he was a kid in Mississippi, Rice spent summers working 8-4 for his father, a bricklayer. Someone would throw Jerry bricks at the construction site. He would catch them. He did this every day. And then he went to football practice. Catching footballs is easy compared to bricks.

In the offseason now, at age 40, Rice still runs a 2 1/2-mile hill near his home. The hill, as Rice describes it, is all but vertical. Friends and teammates occasionally drop by. Most can't keep up, even now.

The older we get, the less we need the hot air of vain youth and the more we count on the quiet deeds of experience. In the older warriors, we see the wisdom competition can build. Rice is so much wiser than Keyshawn, he's a professor and Johnson's a second-grader.

Older players are able, through the defining prism of reflection, to understand their good fortune. They know their time is short and behave accordingly.

The Raiders are a testament to that behavior. Say what you will about the team's misperceived image as hellions. These Raiders, the best of them, are as old and wise as any team in recent Super Bowl memory. They work hard, because after a certain age you have to. They also know the view from the top of the mountain and they don't want to give it up.

Rice, who is Yoda-wise, is their guru.

"This is my time of year," he says. "This is what I live for right here. I'm paying attention to detail, running my routes, knowing exactly what the defense is doing. I have based my career around (Super Bowl rings)."

Someone asks Rice about being 40. He has heard the question a few times this week.

"Time flew," Rice says. "Time flew by. But when you're winning Super Bowls. ... I'm 25. I feel like I'm 25."

As the great players age, so do we. In some way, not small, we mark our passing by theirs. When Jack Nicklaus stopped playing the U.S. Open, we felt a pull of regret for him. But it was no stronger than the tug we felt for ourselves. Your heroes get old, and they take you right along with them.

My father still speaks lovingly of Joe DiMaggio.

Rice might be the best football player who ever lived. There is a very good chance that after Sunday, he'll never play again, certainly not on such a grand stage.

If Johnson is very, very good and equally lucky, in 10 years he'll be standing in the same clouds Rice walks on now. And he, too, will understand how great it is, how privileged he has been and how quickly it passes.

That is the hope.

E-mail pdaugherty@enquirer.com

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