Bickley: Arizona Cardinals fuel Valley's sense of pride

The legend of Bruce Arians is growing like a beanstalk. Next month, he will be featured in “A Football Life,” a terrific series dedicated to the biggest names and best stories in NFL history.

During the show, he makes a shocking admission:

“I got booed in the Super Bowl parade,” he says.

That happened in Pittsburgh, where he was once a polarizing offensive coordinator. That would never happen in Arizona, where Arians is the ringleader of a football team that is highly successful, highly entertaining and full of magnetic personalities. The 2015 Cardinals might soon become the most popular sports team in the history of Arizona.

Given the competition, that would be a monstrous accomplishment. Charles Barkley and Dan Majerle were so beloved that the 1993 Suns attracted 300,000 to a summertime pep rally after losing the NBA Finals. Randy Johnson spearheaded a Diamondbacks team that rallied to win the Valley’s first major professional championship and the best World Series in major-league history. Steve Nash started a global basketball revolution from downtown Phoenix, and Lute Olson’s Wildcats toppled three No. 1 seeds while bringing a title to Tucson.

But nothing galvanizes a community like a successful football team, and this one is bringing a tsunami of national attention to the desert. The good kind.

In the last 72 hours alone, a former star running back wondered on the NFL Network why Carson Palmer is so underrated; a NFL analyst said the Cardinals are “going to be the team that represents the NFC in the Super Bowl;” a national radio host wondered why Arians was the only coach who throws the ball deep, refusing to play it safe like his cautious counterparts; while a prominent ESPN insider said the Cardinals have a “resilience that you find in true Super Bowl contenders.”

Meanwhile, the team logo has been a fixture on NBC for two weeks running, an unofficial coming-out party for the little red bird.

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Some scoff at this discussion. Some believe it’s not cool to care what outsiders think, that their words mean nothing. Nothing could be further from the truth.

We are a market full of transients and mixed allegiances. On any given Sunday, Valley sports bars resemble the United Nations, with factions of fans representing most every NFL team. The ascent of the Cardinals is changing all of that. It’s bringing us closer and closer to ideal of one team, one community … the kind many of us left years ago.

The national perception is both confirmation and approbation, adding layers of context to the civic embrace. We are a state often ridiculed in the national media for our quirks, our politics, our obsession with firearms, our summer temperatures and our clock that never changes.

We need not apologize for who we are or require the blessing of others to get out of bed in the morning. But during "Sunday Night Football," Al Michaels said the Cardinals have “turned into one of the best franchises in the league." Unless you’re hopelessly calloused, deeply embittered or a die-hard Cowboys fan, those words should mean something.

Just like the Grand Canyon, Pizzeria Bianco and a cold pint from Four Peaks Brewery, the national approval of our NFL franchise makes you feel proud to be an Arizonan, maybe even enough to claim the state as your own.

These Cardinals aren’t the first football team to go deep. Kurt Warner once led his team to the Super Bowl, laying the groundwork for what we’re all feeling today. But even he admits that team was different.

That team lost to New England by 40 points during the regular season. That team was blown out in Philadelphia on Thanksgiving night. Before the playoffs, some national media members called those Cardinals “a fluke” and “the worst playoff team in NFL history.” There was no national embrace until the Cardinals rolled a hot hand all the way to the Super Bowl, where they lost to an offensive coordinator named Bruce Arians, who subsequently was booed in his team’s victory parade.

In the spirit of Thanksgiving, maybe we should all give a nod to the city of Pittsburgh, a great football town that gets a big assist in helping the Valley become the same.

Reach Bickley at dan.bickley@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-8253. Follow him at twitter.com/danbickley. Listen to “Bickley and Marotta,” weekdays from 12-2 p.m. on Arizona Sports 98.7 FM.