Just when you think it’s impossible to summon any additional admiration and appreciation for the New England Patriots, you read the sports page.

Yup, all that love lives close as your ink-stained hands. There’s no need to fritter away a sweltering summer day watching a film festival of the Snow Bowl and all three Super Bowl triumphs.

Simply pick up a newspaper and see how the other half lives, or dies, even before the first intra-squad fist fight of training camp.

There’s something indescribably delicious about digging in, cup of coffee within reach, and discovering that the mouthpiece of the team you arm-wrestled into submission in last year’s ultimate game is once again immersed in self-love. Or that your greatest rival of yesteryear is confronted with the challenge of melding in the model of me-absorption who’s decided to end his vision quest and fulfill his contractual obligations.

If there’s a more beautiful time of year than January to adore The Franchise Bob Kraft Built, it’s July, when you can revel in a hallelujah chorus of holdouts, hissy-fits and references to self in the third person. Almost without fail, the source is somewhere else.

It’s a great time to laugh, cry and take stock of all our blessings, so we would be remiss if we didn’t borrow one moment of that introspection to say thank you, Terrell Owens, and thank you, Ricky Williams, from the bottom of our collective soul.

Thank you for being who you are, and for being it somewhere else. Actually, while we’re in that celebratory mood, it’d be appropriate to publicly thank Coach Bill Belichick and player personnel guru Scott Pioli for their perpetual insistence upon such insanely high standards of decorum. When you are the world’s champion, after all, surely there is the opportunity and temptation to stray from your core values. Every self-respecting professional who’s ever coveted a third-string quarterback’s championship bling wants to join your club and bolster the value in his own jewelry box.

It’s an engraved invitation to compromise the team-first mantra that made you famous, and to stretch the salary cap until it snaps in your face like a 99-cent bungee cord. Every malcontented free agent goes out of his way to sucker you with his inflated statistics.

Thankfully, like “VH1 Celebrity Fit Club” contestants handcuffed to a buffet, the Patriots’ power brokers just say no to temptation and assemble a team that most of America finds exciting as granola and soybeans. And for that, we shall remain grateful until the next piece of heavy metal is shoehorned into the trophy case at Gillette Stadium.

Don’t know about you, but I’m thrilled that the champs’ most celebrated character flaw is that they bore a pop culture-obsessed nation to tears.

It’s marvelous that we don’t have to worry about our alleged franchise receiver calling out the quarterback as a malingerer while patting himself between the shoulder blades for making a dozen three-yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust-when-I-duck-out-of-bounds catches. It’s serendipitous that our grandest ground gainer won’t choose to spend an autumn smoking dope somewhere in the Outback.

These are bankable guarantees, because the nanosecond somebody in a Flying Elvis helmet even hinted at such look-at-me foolishness he would be gone, and by “gone” I mean exiled to Buffalo.

Here on the set of “Dynasty, The 21st Century,” there is no room for sinking a $50 gazillion contract extension into a borderline All-Pro whose chokehold on the payroll would fray every other link in the organizational chain. There’s no room for “I play when I want to play” or “It’s not about the money,” no place for half-hearted apologies after single-handedly selling a season down the river, no time for zinging a classier teammate every time the camera’s red light is on.

That’s because you’ll be replaced by someone shorter and slower, with no endorsement deals. And while you hit all your bonuses during a meaningless 6-10 season in another city, the team that didn’t have the time for your dog-and-pony show simply keeps winning.

It sure does a heart good.

Kalle Oakes is a staff writer. His can be reached by e-mail at [email protected].