FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. -- Little more than 48 hours from Super Bowl 44, the possibility persists that this mostly limp NFL postseason hasn't had its indelible moment yet -- its James Harrison interception odyssey, its Santonio Holmes tipfest, the fingertip, tiptoe, toe-tap crescendo.

Maybe it's coming Sunday in this South Florida reckoning between the Indianapolis Colts and the New Orleans "Oh My God We're in the Super Bowl" Saints, and maybe it will lift this tournament from a relatively tepid entertainment pool where the average margin of postseason victory has been more than 15 points per episode.

But for the most stunning athleticism in a single burst to this point, I would have a hard time ignoring Pierre Garcon, or at least a much harder time than all the NFL's general managers had ignoring him in the 2008 draft, when the Colts (and then only with a sixth-round compensatory pick) made him the 205th pick.

Twenty-seven wideouts went before him, including Limas Sweed.

In the divisional round against Baltimore, Garcon was running downfield into Ed Reed's deep zone, where Reed intercepted a Peyton Manning pass at the Ravens' 35 and was in a full sprint the other way by the time he hit the 40. Garcon, who started on flat feet 5 yards behind one of the game's all-time great safeties, started chasing him.

For what?

I don't know, either.

But 45 yards later, at the Indianapolis 35, Garcon not only closed on Reed, he lunged and poked the football upward like a bar of soap from under Reed's right arm. The Colts recovered and went on to win, 20-3.

"I think that's a testament to their desire to excel, to their work ethic," Colts head coach Jim Caldwell said the other day about Garcon and teammate Austin Collie, who have replaced Marvin Harrison and Anthony Gonzalez to keep Manning's weapon stock just about unbeatable. "I don't think any of us would have imagined that they would come along so quickly and perform so well consistently."

Collie is a wonder as well, but at least he has had the advantage of the pass laboratory that for so long has been Brigham Young football. Garcon is out of Mount Union, a successful Ohio program, to be sure, but not a common stop for players with NFL pedigree. What were the Colts more impressed with on Garcon's football resume -- his performances in the Amos Alonzo Stagg Bowl against Wisconsin-Whitewater, or the four touchdowns he scored for Norwich University against St. John Fisher in his only autumn in Vermont?

Yes, Vermont.

"Oh, I remember him," said Charlie Crosby, a Norwich spokesman, on the phone Thursday from the private military school in Northfield, Vt., where Garcon spent 2004 before bolting for Mount Union. "That's a mystery to us, why he left, but you can't blame the kid for wanting to go somewhere where he had a chance to play for a national championship. Frankly and honestly, we don't put that kind of money into the football program here."

But in the run-up to the Super Bowl, where companies put up to $3 million into 30 seconds of advertising just to be next to it, Garcon continues to amaze teammates with a kind of signature transformation, from quiet and shy to near downright dominant once he crosses the sideline.

"That was exactly the way he was here," said Crosby. "When he puts his helmet on, he changes character."

When he put his helmet on for the AFC championship game last week, he caught a title-game record 11 passes for 151 yards and a touchdown as the Colts were cobbling together the 24 unanswered points that grounded the New York Jets.

"I always play with a chip on my shoulder," Garcon said Thursday in the week's final player availability. "I'm playing for myself and my people. When I go out there, I'm trying to be the best and I'm doing anything and everything possible to help the team win and help myself do well."

So he scalded veteran Jets cover man Lito Sheppard to set up Indianapolis' first score, then got behind the entirety of Rex Ryan's bombastic defense for the score that put the Colts up for good.

In the Super Bowl at a still tender 23, he's carrying the great added weight of unremitting heartache as a native Haitian, and the world's largest media horde won't stop poking at it.

"The most affective images out of Haiti was seeing the kids' dead bodies on the ground, seeing the people running, having nowhere to go," Garcon said of an ancestral island in its fourth week of post-earthquake torment. "Now I'm seeing people in tents that don't know how long they're going to be living in tents. Those are some of the most disturbing images."

Garcon has never had any problem appreciating the professional good fortune he has earned, his much less-traveled path to this Super Bowl a ready reminder, but the work he continues to do for Haiti only refocuses his place and his impact amid unimaginable difficulties.

There's so much more to ponder than a Colts victory right now, but Garcon sure wouldn't mind being the player you remember about it, wouldn't mind making that indelible play.

"It would be great," he said. "It would be like the perfect storm. You go down with an earthquake and you come back with a Super Bowl championship to help rebuilt a country."

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