In the past when grumbling arose about the financing of Paul Brown Stadium, a former colleague of mine would argue that if the Bengals just had a phenomenal season, all would be well.

It's true that winners are forgiven much. It's also true that the sun shines brighter in cities with championship teams, and they have stronger identities. You say Indianapolis, I say Colts.

But Cincinnati doesn't have a championship team. It has a team that doesn't seem to know who it is, or how to get better. And just as a winning team pumps energy into a city, a losing team sucks optimism out.

This year there is an especially long, loud sucking sound as Hamilton County struggles to provide basic services while trying to pay off crushing debt from two stadiums.

To some Greater Cincinnatians, the stadiums will always be the worst deal Hamilton County officials ever made, shrouded in shysterism. Even a Super Bowl win will not bring forgiveness from these taxpayers.

But the economic reality of giving up sheriff's patrols and jail space to provide a marvelous facility for a mediocre team tests the resolve of even die-hard sports fans.

Spectator sports are all about believing. Lose the myth, the fantasy - the belief that, for the price of a ticket, you'll see humans do things humans cannot do - and football could devolve to one person throwing an olive-shaped inflatable to another person who runs across a painted white line.

Golf, minus the Tiger mystique, could be revealed to be simply a person using a stick to knock a ball into a hole in the ground.

This is sacrilege to the devotee who sees sport as a metaphor for the noble struggle of man against the odds or elements.

Not only have multibillion-dollar industries grown up around athletics, but ritual and romance as well.

Records are kept with a near-religious fanaticism (shaken only when the record-holder admits to steroid use). Fireworks go off for teams that couldn't even beat Detroit.

Fans pay good money to wear players' names on their backs long after those players have done anything remotely productive.

But the question is, how long will a city keep believing?

Two consecutive weeks of seeing the Bengals kicked around by the New York Jets sure wasn't fun.

And years of highly paid, heavily promoted recruits - do the names Ki-Jana Carter and Akili Smith ring a bell? - who slink away into well-compensated anonymity eventually take a toll on credulity.

There's an argument to be made that even unsuccessful franchises contribute to a region's economic well-being.

But so do a safe downtown, a comprehensive mass transit system and first-rate public schools - all efforts that would benefit from public subsidies now being soaked up by the stadium fund.

The Bengals and Reds aren't only competing with the Steelers and the Phillies. They're competing with everything else that does - or could - make Cincinnati a standout American city.

Being a major league sports franchise isn't enough; a team has to start behaving like one. And being a major-league city takes a whole lot more than big stadiums and tailgating