Ugly win might have a ring to it Gary Shelton, The St.Petersburg Times, published 29 September 1997 It was the ugliest afternoon imaginable. So you're going to have to trust Tony Dungy a little bit when he tells you what he saw in the middle of all the slop. He saw the mark of a champion. Honest. Amazing what you find in the middle of a trash heap, isn't it? The Bucs spend most of an afternoon looking like garbage, and Dungy looks and sees gold. They look like yesterday all over, and he sees it as a claim on tomorrow. The thing about it is, we have come to trust Dungy's vision. He stared 0-5 in the face last year, and he saw promise. He looked at a quarterback who was struggling and saw potential. He looked at a terrible preseason and saw enough positives that a 5-0 doesn't seem to shock him. So when Dungy looks at the way his team was manhandled by the 1-3 Arizona Cardinals and sees enough to smile, the temptation is to wonder if he sees things you do not. So what if his team managed only six first downs? So what if it averaged only 2.2 yards per rush? So what it if converted on only 14 percent of its third downs? So what if this looked very much like a game this team did not deserve? To Dungy, it still was something to see. "Every championship team, if they look back, has a couple of games like this when everything isn't going quite right," Dungy said. "Some way, somehow, they find a way to win it." Someway, somehow. John Lynch making an interception, his first of the year, on the Arizona 35 with seven minutes to play. Someway, somehow. Karl "The Truth" Williams catching his only pass of the day, beating All-Pro corner Aeneas Williams, on fourth and 6. Someway, somehow. Trent Dilfer, on a forgettable afternoon, hitting on the most important play of the day. If it left Dungy seeing things, you have to understand. Any team can win when it always seems to be third and 1 with a two-touchdown lead. But, whether because of providence or perseverance, few would have found a way to win this one. Champions, he said. He is not a man prone to throwing around such words. But the word kept spilling out of Dungy on Sunday. He did not mention it after his team beat the 49ers, or the Dolphins. He did not say it after road victories in Detroit and Minnesota. But on a day when the Cardinals missed a field goal that could have won it, when Tampa Bay's defense gave up 339 passing yards, when the offense was stuck in 1992, the Bucs showed something to Dungy they had not shown him before. "Yeah, they really did," he said. "The first four games, we were ahead and everything was going our way. But to win under adversity, to come from behind under pressure, that's what championship teams do. We aren't there yet. We have a ways to go. But today, they showed me they have the makings of that." To Dungy, this was another mark on the growth chart. The maturity of a team, he called it. There is little question that the Bucs of the first half of last season would not have won this game. Nor would the Bucs of the previous 14 seasons, either. The history of this team is that adversity has been a time to find a place to hide, and the Cardinals had taken away everything the Bucs do well. Neither Mike Alstott nor Warrick Dunn were able to get going, and the rhythm of the offense was never present. The defense looked at times as if it was just hanging on until help arrived. Sometimes, games are like that. Nothing goes right. Good teams win a lot of those games. Bad teams grumble how the luck never seems to even out. We have seen the Bucs on the other side of the equation enough to know the difference. "They aren't going to look at the standings at the end of the season and put an asterisk by this one," Hardy Nickerson said. "They're just going to put a `W.' " As bad as the Bucs were for most of the game, they were at their best when the plays were at their biggest. That says something, at least. Lynch made a play. And Dilfer. And Williams. "Big-time players make big-time plays," is the way tackle Warren Sapp summed it up. Okay, it was ugly. The Bucs should have lost. They will not win again playing that poorly. But that's what victory does. No matter how many warts you have, it leaves your team looking good. And it allows a head coach to see a mess on the field as a work of art. Even if it was abstract.