Colin Kaepernick (AP)
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NEW ORLEANS — Not every athlete who hits it huge endures this rite of passage, but most of them do. LeBron James, for instance, never was going to sneak up on anyone, not off the cover of Sports Illustrated while he was still in high school. Bryce Harper? Maybe he snuck up on someone in the third grade, but that was the last time.
That’s the rare breed.
Joe Flacco and Colin Kaepernick are more the norm, because they didn’t play at high-profile universities, because they weren’t on television every week, or hyped for the Heisman Trophy. They weren’t child stars whose progress was charted by every amateur draftnik with a wireless Internet connection.
And they have unusual names.
So there comes the critical moment in an athlete’s career when they go from unknown to known, from anonymous to ubiquitous. Go ahead and peruse stories about Flacco from early in his career — or earlier this season, for that matter. Sense the dismissiveness.
What’s a Flacco?
You can’t stop Joe Flacco, you can only contain him!
You can’t let Joe Flacco beat you!
And you better believe the same whispers followed Kaepernick the first few times the uninitiated caught his act.
“Oh good! Another wildcat quarterback!” …. “Check it out: Tebow with tats!” … “Colin Kaepernick? Is that a quarterback or the president of Sigma Delta Kappa?” …
And tonight, just in front of 10:30 or so, one of them will be a Super Bowl champion quarterback, and the odds are good one of them will be able to lift the Lombardi Trophy with one hand and the Super Bowl MVP trophy in the other. If that’s no guarantee they will be given a passing-lane trip to Canton, it does mean they will go down forever, as a championship quarterback.
And that’s not a bad way to spend a life. Ask Phil Simms. Ask Jim Plunkett. Ask Doug Williams. Ask Trent Dilfer. None of them can see the inside of the Hall of Fame without a ticket, and it doesn’t matter: They’re forever names attached to forever games attached to forever teams.
Same as Flacco will be. Or Kaepernick.
Think about the odds of that at the beginning of September. Or the beginning of January, for that matter.
“I always believed in myself, and when you have that kind of confidence it can carry you through a lot of tough times,” Flacco said earlier in the week. “I never lost faith in myself. If you do that, you might as well try something else because you can’t succeed without that belief.”
Kaepernick: “Maybe I never thought this would all happen to me so quickly. But I did think I could play football at this level.”
That’s the beauty of it, though, especially at that position. You never know where greatness lurks, and you never know where the dark horse will come galloping in from. Nobody is more bathed in mythology than Johnny Unitas, but before he became the great Johnny U, he was cut by the Steelers, handed is walking papers at the door of Hickey Dining Hall at St. Bonaventure, where the Steelers trained.
“If [it had] ended for me there,” Unitas said years later, “you never woulda heard of old Johnny U.”
Tom Brady? You might have heard that 198 men heard their names called in the 2000 draft before he did. And if you thought to yourself on the day Mo Lewis nearly killed Drew Bledsoe, as you watched Brady trot onto the field against the Jets, “Tom Brady? Wasn’t he the guy who wasn’t very good at Michigan?” you weren’t exactly alone.
Only Unitas recovered from that moment, wound up handing the ball off to Alan Ameche, and became a secular deity. Brady shrugged off the doubters and has crafted himself one of the greatest careers of all time.
Time was, PA announcers pronounced the name “YOU-nitas,” as opposed to U-NI-tas.” Surnames always are the stumbling block.
Until.
Until Colin Kaepernick goes from unknown to unstoppable. Until Joe Flacco becomes Joe Folk Hero. By the close of business today, one of their lives will never be the same. That’s the safest bet of the day.
michael.vaccaro@nypost.com