MIAMI (AP) – Ron Plourde hosted a small house party when his beloved New England Patriots played in the 2002 Super Bowl, and he’ll never forget Adam Vinatieri’s kick sailing through the uprights to beat St. Louis for the title.

At that moment, food sailed off plates, drinks sloshed from glasses and every phone in the house – land lines and cells – began ringing simultaneously, as other long-suffering Patriots fans called just to scream joyous, maniacal thoughts at one another.

“I figured the only thing better than that was to see it happen in person,” said Plourde, a native of Lewiston and the baseball coach and an exercise science teaching associate at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. “And when the Pats went back last year, I had to see that game.”

So, carrying plenty of cash and hope, Plourde, his brother and a few friends set off to secure one of sports’ toughest tickets and fulfill their Super Bowl odyssey.

Yet after a four-hour flight from Albany to Dallas (the fare was hundreds less than going to Houston), followed by a four-hour drive and two days of on-foot searching for anyone willing to part with a prized ducat, Plourde eventually watched the Patriots win another Super Bowl – on television, in a restaurant.

He couldn’t find a seat there, either.

Instead, Plourde crammed into a space with other unsuccessful ticket-seekers, watched the game, drove back to Dallas and caught an early morning flight home – in time to run baseball practice Monday afternoon.

“It was great to see them win, believe me,” said Plourde, who never found anyone selling a ticket below his $1,000 spending cap. “But I’d say that the whole experience was more frustrating than anything else. There had to be 15,000 other Patriots fans in the same position I was; just awe-struck and out of luck.”

Tickets for this year’s Super Bowl are being sold on the Internet for $6,000 or more. Those few hotels with a room or two still available because of cancellations are getting top-dollar prices. And low-cost flight and rental car options are long gone, meaning fans still without tickets or travel itineraries will find getting to Jacksonville, Fla. for the game a demanding task.

Hotel availability is already scarce even two hours away from Alltel Stadium, where the AFC and NFC champions will play Feb. 6 for the NFL title. Flights are booked virtually solid, meaning late-planning fans without thousands in disposable cash are settling for flights to airports in Tampa, Orlando and Atlanta.

And travel agents and teams expect to be flooded with calls from desperate ticket-seekers Sunday night, after the AFC and NFC winners are decided.

“That’s when the mad rush comes,” said Brian Wilder, president of Premiere Sports Travel, based in Cary, N.C. “When people know their team is going, we immediately start getting phone calls. Last year when Carolina was in the game, we had eight people reserve online 30 seconds after the NFC championship game was over.”

Wilder’s company can get you there, place you in a hotel and get you a ticket – but it’s not cheap. Sleeping four to a room will cost about $3,900 apiece; single rooms will run around $5,400 for a three-night stay.

“The Super Bowl is the biggest sporting event in the world,” Wilder said. “And we like to say we make people’s dreams come true.”

With a finite number of seats available – Alltel Stadium holds about 79,000 fans – supply for Super Bowl tickets will never come close to satisfying the demand. The league office controls 25.2 percent of the tickets, which are doled out to NFL-affiliated companies, corporate sponsors, charities and local organizers.

The two teams will each receive 17.5 percent of the tickets, which are primarily distributed to season-ticket holders through a lottery – and some clubs offer those who bought higher-priced season packages a better chance of winning the right to buy Super Bowl tickets at $500 or more.

Jacksonville, the host team, received 5 percent of the tickets; the remaining NFL clubs each get 1.2 percent of the available seats.

“It’s not just people in suits,” said NFL spokesman Greg Aiello. “It’s a real football crowd. It’s a wide distribution.”

There will also be an inevitable criminal element preying on desperate ticket-seekers. Hundreds of fans were turned away in Houston last year because their tickets – some purchased for more than $2,500 on the street – were counterfeit.

Genuine Super Bowl tickets carry a hologram, plus have other security layers which fans can recognize. Aiello warns fans not to purchase tickets from non-reputable agents.

“We keep our ears to the ground through our various sources to make sure we’re aware of anything unusual or improper,” Aiello said. “Every year we try to make sure that fans understand how Super Bowl tickets are prepared, what to look for and that they should be careful about the source of their purchase.”

Plourde doesn’t plan to spend this Super Bowl weekend chasing tickets, even if the Patriots defeat Pittsburgh on Sunday and earn the right to play in their third Super Bowl in four years.

Some of his friends have already booked flights to Orlando – again, because fares were considerably lower than Jacksonville – and will carry that same hope of finding their way into the stadium for football’s biggest game.

But if Plourde, a Patriots’ season-ticket holder, doesn’t win his tickets through the team’s distribution lottery, he’ll happily watch from his couch.

“There’s the fear of counterfeit tickets and the fear of going through last year all over again,” Plourde said. “I’m just not sure it’s worth it. I want to make sure I enjoy the game.”