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closes his eyes, he can see 1966. “Gives you a little pride,” he said.

Tom Goode, the old center? He’s come in from clearing up hurricane damage off his farm in West Point, Mississippi. He is a ’66er at 66. Limps like most aging football men.

He can’t complain, though. The town named a street after him a while back. He lives in the same house in which he was raised. At 9190 Tom Goode Road.

He was still in Miami the next season, when somebody let an armadillo loose in Griese’s motel room, and Griese leaped for safety onto his bed, waving a golf club.

But ’66 was special. You can only be first once, after all.

“Think about it all the time,” Goode said. “It’s always there.”

THINGS FAIRYTALES ARE MADE OF

Joe Auer doesn’t happen. Not in real life. Never. Going on 40 years later, it still seems a bit surreal to him.

A kid from nearby Coral Gables High runs the opening kickoff in franchise history 95 yards for a touchdown against the Oakland Raiders in the Orange Bowl?

Get me rewrite. Who’d believe that fairy tale?

“I’m having a tough time living that one down,” Auer said, chuckling.

The Dolphins’ first hero is 63 today, living in Winter Park, anything but retired. He owns a computer consulting and training firm, and – remember that dune buggy with the rollbars? – fledgling NASCAR team.

He’s not sure even his racecar driver knows his background.

“I don’t make a practice of telling people.”

History somehow has passed down only one indelible snapshot of that first Dolphins year, and it is Auer’s improbable fireworks that launched a franchise. Forty years on, it’s as if everything else about 1966 has disappeared, except that.

“A storybook thing,” Auer called it.