If you are the team you believe you are, if you are the Super Bowl team you have been telling us you are, then you can tug on Superman’s cape all you want.
Yesterday was the 42nd anniversary of the Super Bowl III Broadway Joe Namath guaranteed. The Colts were so infuriated they couldn’t do a thing about it and lost 16-7.
So today is the perfect time to remind Rex Ryan, to remind Antonio Cromartie — to remind every last Jet — that it is fine to talk the talk.
But more than ever, this is the game, this is the moment, this is the time for the 2010 Jets to walk the Joe Willie walk.
Tom Brady was a Hall of Fame quarterback and had won three Super Bowls long before Ryan started woofing about his preparation compared to Peyton Manning’s and about his celebratory antics. Long before Cromartie went overboard and called him an a—hole.
Was Brady saying he hated the Jets and didn’t watch “Hard Knocks” the reason the Jets beat the Patriots in Week 2? And if it was, did they suddenly forget how much Brady hated them before 45-3?
“I think Tom Brady’s a great player, and I don’t think he’s gonna read a great paper like the New York Post for example, to get motivated to play,” Jets GM Mike Tannenbaum said. “He’s been so successful for so long that I don’t think any quote is gonna affect his preparation.”
If Ryan had announced Brady was the modern-day Joe Montana, if Cromartie, who hasn’t won anything in his five NFL seasons, had blurted he loves Brady’s leadership and competitiveness so much he has a poster of him in his bedroom, do you think Brady would lust to win this game any less? The game that gets him to within 60 minutes of his fifth Super Bowl appearance? How much did Plaxico Burress’ Super Bowl XLII prediction — Giants 23, Pats 17 — motivate Brady by the way?
“I don’t think he needs any more motivation,” Patriots owner Robert Kraft told The Post yesterday. “He’s pretty focused, like our head coach. I can’t speak to why other people would do that. It’s not the way we do things, but I don’t want to sit in judgment of what works for another team.”
Cromartie kept talking the talk yesterday, and expressed no worries about giving Brady and the Patriots bulletin board material.
Who’s afraid of the Big Bad Wolverine?
“They can have all the material they want to,” Cromartie said. “It’s about what you do in between those white lines.”
I asked Cromartie if he expects Brady to target him now, the way he targeted and humbled Steelers safety Anthony Smith for guaranteeing a victory over the Perfect Patriots in December of 2007. “I hope so; I honestly do,” Cromartie said.
Smith was not in Cromartie’s league.
“I’m not worried about Cromartie one bit,” Jerricho Cotchery said. “He’s a prime-time player.”
And this week he’s become the poster child for the talkative Jets.
“This team has been talking for a couple of years now,” Cotchery said. “Whatever Rex says — be who you are. Be who you are, and don’t try to mask who you are.”
But here’s the problem: It puts a bull’s-eye on The Team They Love to Hate.
“If you talk, yeah,” Cotchery said. “No question, if you’re a talking team, or you have a lot of talkative guys on your team, of course everybody’s gonna have their eyes on you, but you still have to go out and perform, and everybody in here knows that.”
It is called Walking the Walk.
“Most talkers know if I’m gonna say something, I’m gonna have to back it up,” Cotchery said. “And that’s what we have. We have a bunch of guys that know if they say something, they’re gonna have to back it up.”
Can the talk have any effect on Brady?
“I don’t know. . . . He has a history of trying to shut guys up or whatever. . . . We’ll see what happens on Sunday,” Cromartie said.
Forty years and four days later, it is time for these Jets to walk the walk for the ages.
“I think at the end of the day, it’s gonna be about how we play on Sunday,” Tannenbaum said.
Talk like Namath. Play like Supermen.
steve.serby@nypost.com