One small step for the New England Patriots. Another giant leap for hard work and sanity over the convoluted logic that prevails among most mass media and over the me-first mentality that pervades just about every other franchise in professional sports.

Those of us blessed to watch the world champions every week remain the only ones who get it. The Sunday morning pre-game show desk jockeys still don’t get it. The overrated, overhyped, allegedly superior individual talent in other National Football League locker rooms still doesn’t get it.

Hear this, already, and make sure to learn it and live it, even if you are incapable of loving it: As long as Tom Brady, Adam Vinatieri and Bill Belichick are wearing that goshawful, officially licensed, Flying Elvis logo, the Patriots will win every meaningful football game on their schedule for the foreseeable future.

Every. Each. All of ’em. That means don’t bet against them versus Pittsburgh or Indianapolis, even if their starting secondary is comprised of Paul, Ringo and two guys masquerading as John and George.

I preach to you as a humble, depraved sinner; a repeat offender and an impulse buyer of the hype. You’re looking at a sorry schlub who picked the Colts last January, boarded the Steelers’ bandwagon in our Friday morning staff selections and circled Pittsburgh in every pool that steals my milk money. I’ve imbibed more Choke-A-Cola than Bill Belichick Kool-Aid.

Never again.

The unfortunate thing about Sunday’s “upset” of the Pittsburgh Steelers, other than the apparent season-killing injuries to Rodney Harrison and Matt Light, was that the Patriots even needed another breathtaking, last-second boot by their Hall of Fame-bound kicker.

That’s right, Vinatieri belongs in the Hall of Fame. The discrimination against kickers and special teams players over the years is criminal. There are umpires and sportswriters in the Baseball Hall of Fame, for goodness sake. But I digress.

New England dominated that game, and if you don’t think so, you weren’t watching. The Patriots committed more unforced errors in the first three quarters than Anna Kournikova did in her entire tennis career and still won.

They won because the grouchy genius, Belichick, coached his butt off, and far as I could tell didn’t have Charlie Weis and Romeo Crennel on speaker phone.

They won because Tom Brady, who also is a lock for Canton even if he wakes up tomorrow as Babe Laufenberg, was perfect in the fourth quarter. The guy completed passes to Kevin Faulk, Patrick Pass and the team’s equipment manager on the winning drive. There is nobody since the advent of the forward pass who I would want taking my team’s snaps in the final two minutes of regulation more than Brady. Nobody.

They won because Pittsburgh, while talented and deep in all three facets of the game, is as self-absorbed as every other team in the league.

Art Rooney and Mike Webster rolled over in their graves at some of the Steelers’ shenanigans Sunday. There was Antwaan Randle El’s arrogant attempt to lateral the ball deep in New England territory when his team had a chance to snag a double-digit lead. Here’s a good rule of thumb: Never try to show up a team that’s won back-to-back world championships, even if you’re playing their JVs.

There was Ben Roethlisberger’s chest-thumping after his game-tying touchdown toss to Hines Ward, which came on the heels of a gift pass interference call against Chad Scott. Hey Ben, did you notice there were 81 seconds left on the clock? Guess you haven’t followed Brady’s career too closely. We’ll get that highlight film right out in the mail to you.

At least Steelers coach Bill Cowher gets it. He didn’t even bother using his final timeout to freeze Vinatieri, the guy who’s good from 40-to-50 yards in domes, blizzards and every environment in between. “How many times has that guy been frozen?” Cowher asked nobody in particular at his post-game press conference.

Some of those revisionist historians on ESPN and CBS pretended to get it Sunday night, but they’ll be overcome by short-term memory loss before you know it. Listen closely and you can already hear the drumbeat beginning.

The Patriots host the Indianapolis Colts on Oct. 7. It’s a Monday night game, so we’ll have an extra day’s earful of pony plaudits. Look at Indy’s schedule and it isn’t hard to imagine them being 7-0.

By then, Peyton Manning will snap out of his funk and re-emerge as the best quarterback in his family again. That evolving defense will shut out the Texans or 49ers, and Mike Ditka and Tom Jackson will start drawing insipid comparisons to the 1985 Chicago Bears. Richard Seymour and Corey Dillon could join Harrison, Light and Bruschi in street clothes, for all we know.

And the Patriots will win again. Easily.

Kalle Oakes is a staff writer. His e-mail is [email protected].