Cardinals' Fitzgerald not ready to return to earth

TAMPA - Uneasy rest the flowing braids that wear the crown as Super Bowl week's dominant player.

Or so an eloquent sage once said. Shakespeare? Emmitt Smith? Details are fuzzy.

Talking to Larry Fitzgerald, though, you get the sense he isn't sure that he's "all that," the way the media, his teammates, the opposing Pittsburgh Steelers and the public seem to think.

"It's a little different, a little weird," Fitzgerald, 25, said yesterday. "I'm trying to get there. I want to be a dominant player in this game. But as I watch myself on tape, there's still things I really need to improve on, to be the consistently dominant player that you see - the LaDainian Tomlinsons, the Peyton Mannings . . . they've been dominating from year-to-year. I continue to work toward that."

The playoff stats are startling - 23 catches in three games, for 419 yards and five touchdowns. No NFL player has ever compiled that many receiving yards in his first three playoff games. No NFL player has ever compiled that many receiving yards in any postseason, ever - and Fitzgerald still has this little thing called Super Bowl XLIII to add to his ledger.

He was the NFC's leading receiver in the regular season (96 catches for 1,431 yards), and in the playoffs, he has gone from excellent to seemingly unstoppable. Ask the Eagles, who watched Fitzgerald tie a league postseason record with three TD catches (all in the first half!) in their NFC Championship Game loss to the Cards.

"If you can say you're happy for anybody, I would say he's one of the guys that I'm definitely happy to see getting the chance to go on the national stage and show what type of player he is," Eagles safety Brian Dawkins said yesterday. Dawkins clearly would have been much happier if he and his teammates had denied Fitzgerald this opportunity and claimed it for themselves, but they fell short there, to the tune of nine catches for 152 yards. "We didn't do a good job of recognizing where he was at all times and making sure we paid attention to him."

Dawkins' Steelers counterpart, Troy Polamalu, was asked this week what he thought Pittsburgh had to do to stop Fitzgerald.

"We don't know," Polamalu said. "Nobody has been able to contain him yet."