They sprinted through the tunnel toward the victorious visitors' locker room. Quarterback Brett Favre and cornerback Ty Law, two of the oldest players on the Jets, bounded up the ramp like children in a footrace instead of golden oldies with 32 years of combined N.F.L. experience.

That was when they beat the Titans. Here's when they lost to the Niners:

These are the same Jets who sauntered into Tennessee last month and dropped the Titans from the ranks of the unbeaten, the same Jets who vanquished the ghosts of Patriots past the week before with a victory in Foxborough, Mass.

But those Jets - the ones who elicited talk of an all-New York Super Bowl with the Giants - have looked like the same old Jets in recent losses to Denver and San Francisco, the same old Jets of 40 years of tortured history since their last Super Bowl victory.

Every Greg Bishop game story is a bronze-plated rendering of Football History. It's the Jets, for crapsake! Less opera, more soap opera. "The people who read his stories are the Jets fans who have been students of this team long before he came around," a Jets fan wrote me after the San Francisco story went up. "I don't need the beat reporter to tell me any of this—I want news, I want insight that I couldn't get from CBS."

Another Jets-loving friend calls him "a fancy-pants version of Randy Cross...He might as well be writing about the Seahawks. He certainly gives the impression of someone who's doing time on the beat because the Giants slot is taken."

That's the backbone of Gorney's epic, sprawling profile of Nadal — which couldn't have hit newsstands at a better time, with his withdrawing from Wimbledon on Friday, even if it's actually just a big cover-up and he's already won it.

But before you get all psyched out about reading many, many words, here's one thing to think about.

With this story, The Times Magazine — and its Play, R.I.P. — has published two of the finest long-form profiles of Nadal and Roger Federer. What's more, the authors of the profiles (Gorney, a creative writing professor, and the late David Foster Wallace, he of no further introduction), are not sportswriters but writer's writers.

And those running a sports magazine could take yet another hint from this type of standard: Sometimes, it pays to turn your pages over to outsiders. Not all the time, mind you, but sometimes, for a fresh take. They might not know anything about sports — still, DFW did — but they can make sentences cha-cha real smooth. Or squirt a variety of juices in your face.

That's what matters most.

Ripped. (Or Torn Up?) [New York Times Magazine]
Roger Federer As Religious Experience [Play]

On Friday, the financially struggling Globe reported that three locals with millions in loose change had emerged as potential buyers of Beantown's newspaper of record, which The New York Times is actively trying to sell. (Newspapers, if you haven't heard, aren't doing so well.)

Behind Door No. 1: Stephen Pagliuca, managing partner of the Celtics.

Pagliuca's day job as the managing director of Bain Capital gives him the kind of cash to pay for Kevin Garnett and potentially dole out the loot necessary to purchase a far-less-intriguing commodity. No one really knows what the Globe is worth — estimates range from $1 to much, much more — but if Pagliuca scores the newspaper, you would think he would have to immediately address the obvious conflict of interest in his owning the Globe's sports section, once the best in the country and still a veritable powerhouse, while presiding over one of the local teams.

All it would take is a statement resembling NESN's list of 10 values, of which "Integrity" is No. 7 — behind "Adaptability" and "Teamwork" — and concisely defined as: "We are committed to the highest level of ethics and professional standards." Somewhere, Dennis Eckersley nods in approval.

If Pagliuca does add the Globe to his list of holdings, the only Boston team left out of this ethical quandary would be the Patriots. Bill Belichick declined to comment.

3 men with local roots emerge as potential Globe buyers [The Boston Globe]
What Price For The Boston Globe? [The New York Times]
The Last, Best Sports Staff [Deadspin]

If you never read Play, which folded in November after a three-year run, then you should begin posthaste with David Foster Wallace's essay about Roger Federer. It is as fine a piece of sports prose as you'll ever come across, and now almost too heartbreaking to read. According to the NYRM story (maddeningly unlinkable and unpastable), the piece came about after this amusingly brief exchange between Foster Wallace and Play editor Mark Bryant:

If the result seems toweringly high-minded for a sports outlet, that's because the magazine was born in opposition to everything else on the newsstand. Times Magazine editor Gerald Marzorati cooked up the idea for Play during a layover in Boston:

Maybe, if you squinted hard, you could imagine the Foster Wallace story in Sports Illustrated. Maybe. It's a sad state of affairs when a magazine premised on the idea that sportswriting is more than just a wordy ad campaign for whatever's on ESPN that week is too fragile and idealistic to live past the age of 3. RIP.

Game Over [NYRM]
Roger Federer As Religious Experience [New York Times]

As newspapers collapse and journalism circles the drain hole and all that, one of the survival techniques for media companies has been to shed non-core assets to prop up the failing news business for a bit longer. Unfortunately, it's hard to sell anything in this market except hope. If the Tribune Company could have sold the Chicago Cubs and/or Wrigley Field in 2008, they may not have needed to declare bankruptcy so soon (or at all). Also, the NHL might have new investment in the Phoenix Coyotes by now and wouldn't have to keep pouring money into the franchise.

Still, Times Co. has let the other investors in New England Sports Ventures (owners of the Sawx and Fenway) know that they're looking to get out by selling their 17.5% share. No buyers have been identified and it's not clear if anyone can offer enough credit to float such a deal, but it's definitely a time to bargain shop if you've ever wanted to own part or all of a sports franchise.

Times Co. Seeking to Sell Its Stake in the Red Sox [New York Times, conveniently enough]

Essentially, they're just hopefully amusing, insightful essays about the games we obsess over in the postseason. We'll be filing pretty much every night about 2 a.m., which means, as always, the month of October will consist of as little sleep as possible. We hope you enjoy it ... and it's free now! Honest!

Fair And Foul [New York Times]
Out Of Bounds [New York Times]

"Because of an editing error, a sports article in some copies on Sunday about the University of Alabama's 6-3 football victory over the University of Tennessee misstated the given name of a linebacker who is a leader of the Alabama defense. He is DeMeco Ryans, not Demerol."

We're gonna go ahead and let Warren — who writes for the NYT, which is even funnier — have the last word here: "We've been meaning to run the following correction for a while: a previous post on the RJYH blog misstated the name of Alabama's head coach. It is Mike Shula, not God-I'm-dying-for-a-bourbon-and-water Shula."

From The Curious Corrections Department ... [Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer]