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private funding. But the new home did not end the club’s Super Bowl drought.

Again in 1992 Miami was within one win of reaching another Super Bowl but fell short, and would get no closer in the club’s first half century.

Shula would retire after the 1995 season — the last 22 years spent chasing but not reaching his Holy Grail, that elusive third Super Bowl win.

Marino would retire after the ’99 season as perhaps the most accomplished athlete in any sport to not win a championship, personifying the history of a franchise that saw its victory parades early and has spent what must now seem like forever to its fans trying to make new memories.

Shula and Marino head an honor roll of Dolphins in the Pro Football Hall of Fame that includes Buoniconti, Csonka, Griese, Langer, Little, Dwight Stephenson and Paul Warfield. At least one more recent player, Jason Taylor, built a résumé that suggests a bust in Canton waits for him, too.

From Garo Yepremian to the Marks Brothers to Zach Thomas, the franchise timeline has been filled with players who’ve helped make the first 50 seasons memorable.

It’s down to memories, though, isn’t it?

The franchise that was born in the 1960s and reigned in the ’70s stayed exciting and relevant in the 1980s and ’90s thanks largely to Marino. It is the new century that has grown barren, made the fandom increasingly impatient and put the onus on the current and future teams to make Super Bowls something Miami plays in again, not merely hosts.

If the Dolphins have been an enduring timeline for many in South Florida, then it is fair to say we have grown old, quite literally,

waiting for the franchise to reprise its 1972-73 Super Bowl triumphs.

Perspective: Seventy-five of the 122 franchises in America’s Big Four sports have won a championship since the Dolphins were born, but only three of them have kept their fans waiting for another one longer than the 43 years Dolfans have now been waiting.

It has been a long, long time since Joe Auer magically returned that opening kickoff and Danny Thomas sprinted for joy and Flipper flipped — long enough that an 11-year-old boy who was hugging his dad that night might be thinking of retirement now.

It has been almost as long since nothing less than Perfection defined the Miami Dolphins, and since an iconic snapshot frozen in time found a coach – and a franchise, and a city — sitting on top of the world.