If you're asking whether it would have been better for Dan Marino to come storming into the Pro Football Hall of Fame with neck bling made up entirely of Super Bowl rings dangling from a gold chain, the answer is, you betcha. This is still America, according to reliable sources.
It's still America, and America loves its winners, and the Super Bowl is the ultimate win in sports (bad game, usually, but the ultimate win), and Dan Marino never did get one. He played and he played and he played, but it never happened. But Trent Dilfer has a ring.
Is there justice? There certainly must be, or else Marino would not have been recognized on the first ballot as bound for Canton, Ohio.
But is there closure? That one is for Dan Marino to answer.
Steve Young never left a doubt about how he felt on the subject. Young had received two rings for his job as Joe Montana's seldom-used understudy in the 1988 and '89 seasons in San Francisco, but those were glad-you-were-here rings. When Young finally got the one he really wanted, after the 1994 season, he shouted his long since repeated monkey-off-my-back celebration for the TV world to hear.
Looking back, Young says he wishes he had never said that, that it takes away from the significance of the journey to be so focused on one single destination. Of course, Young's also the guy who often said that any season in which the 49ers didn't take the Super Bowl was a train wreck. You want to win or not?
Marino goes into Canton this weekend as the guy with the hole on his résumé. Oh, it doesn't make it an unfit résumé; nothing close to that. Marino threw 34 miles worth of completed passes. He made touchdown throws to 51 different guys, which is ludicrous. You could basically put on a name tag and a pair of shoulder pads, and Marino could find you in the middle of the right route, and get you the ball -- just like that.
Marino was a winner, too. But he also stands as the strongest sort of proof of the vagaries of the team dynamic and the mysteries of quarterback. You can be a Hall of Fame quarterback and yet find yourself never surrounded with exactly the right team, at exactly the right moment, to take things all the way -- or, depending on the perspective, incapable of taking whatever mix it was and leading it all the way yourself.
Jim Kelly went to four Super Bowls and didn't win, which makes him -- well, a winner, obviously, since that means that Kelly took the Bills to four AFC championships. But we judge by the top prize. Second at the Super Bowl is still second.
Dan Marino had only one chance for the gold, and it came in just his second season in the NFL. The opponent was Joe Montana and the 49ers, and it was never close. Marino played 15 years after that and never got back, and it was always something -- a leaky defense or a struggling running game or, I don't know, pick anything. Whatever, Marino finished with an 8-10 career playoff record.
It's kind of shocking, isn't it, 8-10 for the great Dan Marino in the postseason? It sounds incongruous when placed alongside his career statistics and the endless testimonials to his leadership and his ability. But there you go.
The lack of a Super Bowl ring is such a fabulous conversation starter around Cynic's Bend, where conversations of greatness so often go to die. Would John Elway have been thought of as having had a complete career were it not for the Super Bowls he won under Mike Shanahan there at the finish? There's no way in the world. Elway would have come to Marino's fate, which is to be enshrined without being fully vindicated as a champion.
Elway would have been a Hall of Fame quarterback, of course, because he was. He simply was. It's just that he would have been the guy going to Canton with the hole.
Dan Marino gets inducted Sunday, and there won't be anybody whining it's the wrong result. There isn't any reading of Marino's career that would lead a person to conclude that he should not be included in the Hall. But closure? Even on a weekend like this, it's probably asking too much.
Mark Kreidler is a columnist for The Sacramento Bee and a regular contributor to ESPN.com. Reach him at mkreidler@sacbee.com.