The Dolphins own something no other team can claim and something no other team would want, and both are about January. They are the only franchise to finish a season perfect, 17-0 in 1972, sealed in the playoffs and the Super Bowl that closed it. They are also the team that has gone the longest without winning a playoff game, twenty-five years and counting. One trophy case, two extremes.

When their Januarys meant dread for everyone else

Miami used to be the standard. The perfect-season team and its follow-up won back-to-back titles in the early seventies. A decade later came the Epic in Miami, January 1982, a playoff game against San Diego so wild it is still shown start to finish, Kellen Winslow carried off the field, the Chargers winning 41-38 in overtime. Miami lost that one, but it was the kind of loss that proved you belonged. Then Dan Marino arrived and reached a Super Bowl in his second year, and everyone assumed he would own the next decade of postseasons.

The long quiet

He never got back. Marino’s career ended in the playoffs in January 2000, a 62-7 humiliation in Jacksonville, no ring, the best pure passer of his era walking off for the last time in a massacre. Miami won a playoff game the very next season and then the door shut. Twenty-five years now without a January win, the longest active drought of its kind in football. They have returned a handful of times this century and lost every time, the most recent a frozen night in Kansas City.

I do not enjoy writing that, because Miami was once the benchmark. A perfect season is the rarest thing this sport has produced and they have the only one. Dolphins fans, you hold the best record in league history and the longest wait for a playoff win at the same time. From a man whose team has its own kind of January curse, I would not wish the second half of that on anyone.