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I'm watching two nomadic franchises from relative NFL backwaters, sparring for the game's greatest title on a green parking lot beneath a plastic roof. Neither team is capable of executing a field goal, much less scoring a touchdown. The halftime show was sponsored by a dot-com and featured two adolescent crooners with all the texture of an Adam Sandler movie. And even most of the commercials are flatliners.

This isn't a Super Bowl, you said to yourself; it's the grand opening of a strip mall.

Then you're sitting there at the end of the fourth quarter, and Kevin Dyson catches and Mike Jones grabs, and Dyson leans and Jones tugs, and you exhale for the first time in 15 minutes and nearly choke on a mouthful of Cheet-os, and this is what you are thinking:

I just saw the best Super Bowl ever.

In an era of shameless superlatives, when every event or achievement is twisted through microcomparison into the greatest, best, fastest or largest something since sometime (These are the most words put inside parentheses during this column, and the most put into any post-season column in four years!), it is tempting to refer to this as the finest of the XXXIV Super Bowls, merely because it is the most recent.

But with separation from the moment comes clarity of thought, and it becomes easier to put Super Bowl XXXIV in its place. The first three quarters of this Super Bowl were even more boring than the advertisements, but this year, it wasn't because the score was 56-3. Each team botched a pair of field goal attempts. Tennessee's offense was a joke with no punch line. Nobody scored a touchdown until St. Louis's Torry Holt caught a pass from Kurt Warner midway through the third quarter. And admit it – you were thinking about switching to that "Murder, She Wrote" marathon on A&E, weren't you?

Then, quicker than you can say "Angela Lansbury wears adult diapers," the Super Bowl became so good that not even ABC's Banality Twins, Lesley Visser and Lynn Swann, could ruin the game despite having it surrounded. First came Tennessee's marvelous rally to tie the game at 16-all, followed by Warner's stunning 73-yard bomb to Isaac Bruce with just under two minutes to go, and finally the Titans' last drive.

Had the Titans won, the game's penultimate play might be remembered – sorry, but now it's appropriate – as the best in Super Bowl history. With a strength that defies his position, Titans quarterback Steve McNair somehow wriggled free from the clutches of two Rams pursuers as he scrambled right and threw back toward the left, completing the first-down pass that set up the decisive slant pattern to Dyson.

Players like to say that competing in the Super Bowl is something they look forward to telling their grandkids about. While that's true, it's probably not going to be everyone's favorite subject in 30 years ("Grandpa Norwood, can you tell us about 'wide right' again?"). This year, however, all the participants can bounce Junior on their knees and speak proudly of their experience. Thanks to the final quarter, Super Bowl XXXIV will be remembered not for Christina Iglesias and Enrique Aguilera – or is it the other way around? – but for Tennessee's courage, Warner's dramatic masterstroke and Dyson's valiant, agonizing lean.

"[We] didn't fail," Titans coach Jeff Fisher told ABC following the game, "We just had our success put on hold temporarily."

You could say the same of Super Bowl XXXIV, which had its success put on hold for nearly three quarters before becoming one of the best Super Bowls in history. The New York Jets' SB III victory earns a higher place for its significant impact on the makeup of the league. Joe Montana's 92-yard drive to beat the Bengals in 1989 puts that game near the top. Denver's victory in SB XXXII was a better game from beginning to end but didn't offer the last-second suspense. The Giants' 20-19 win over the Bills during the Gulf War was the only other Super Bowl, besides this one, without a turnover.

On suspense quotient alone, SB XXXIV earns a top-five ranking. And that beats the heck out of Angela Lansbury.

January 2000