Leading Off: Tebow's Moment of Truth One week into the N.F.L. playoffs, the most entertaining story of the season travels to the place where fun goes to die: the Tim Tebow phenomenon rolls into New England on Saturday. It's the hero versus the hoodie, an N.F.L. morality tale in four quarters. You thought last week's Broncos victory over the Steelers was big? That was just a warm-up. It is possible, if the N.F.L. maneuvers the levers it has implanted in everyone's heads just right, the entire universe will be watching the Broncos-Patriots game. It might all come to a dull, anticlimactic, evil-empire-wins-in-landslide-again end. You know that going in. You know Bill Belichick will craft a game plan not just to stop Tebow but also to steal all his Christmas presents. The game is in Foxborough, where Belichick controls everything including the weather. The Patriots are the better, more experienced team. The Broncos" magic carpet ride certainly can't glide through all of that, can it? Even with all of that, the belief in Tebow just keeps growing, with an ESPN poll saying he has risen to the status of the country's most popular athlete. Tebow responded by calling it a crazy poll, which would have sent his popularity spiking even more had ESPN installed electrodes for polling purposes. Tebowmania has effectively saturated the country, and yet as this USA Today profile points out, we don't know all that much about him beyond the public image of piety and good deeds. The Broncos insist he is totally for real - of course, he could run for emperor of Colorado and win unanimously right now - and Woody Paige is arguing in The Denver Post that the search for John Elway's successor is finally over. There is one N.F.L. personnel guru, Ken Herock, who has been trumpeting this since before Tebow was drafted, writes Les Carpenter on Yahoo.com, and everyone else is now just going along for the ride. One of the more hilarious parts of this has been watching N.F.L. analysts fall over themselves trying to analyze the wild ups and downs of Tebow, which they have almost universally failed at, writes Jason Cole on Yahoo.com. The odds are against another Broncos victory, although they can learn from the lessons of their regular-season drubbing at the hands of the Patriots, writes Lee Rasizer on CBSSports.com, and Bob Ryan argues in The Boston Globe that the Patriots" defense is just suspect enough to leave some drama in the mix. If it's close in the fourth quarter, the universe will definitely be watching. That game has grown so big, the other three playoff games have been reduced to national sidelights, and the nonplayoff skirmishes - Joe Namath (surprise!) joining the whining about the Jets and Jeff Fisher taking forever to choose between coaching the Rams and Dolphins - have barely registered on the curiosity meter. Such is the power of Tebow. The N.H.L. and the N.B.A. would like to remind you that they exist also, although the N.B.A. is not helping its cause with a compressed season sending players to the injured list in alarming fashion. Atlanta took the biggest hit on Thursday with Al Horford out for three to four months with a torn pectoral muscle, and New York took the highest profile hit when Carmelo Anthony limped off with a sprained ankle. The N.H.L. at least got a little creative on Thursday by having a player traded in the middle of a game. Montreal pulled Mike Cammalleri off the ice in the second period of a loss to Boston to ship him to Calgary, a day after he criticized the team for having a "losing mentality." It immediately reminded everyone of the team's desperate trade of the legendary goalie Patrick Roy after his temper tantrum in 1995, and reminded everyone of how disastrously that worked out. This one prompted Stu Cowan of The Montreal Gazette to lump it into the pathetic fall of the Canadiens" dynasty. If you spend Saturday hoping for the pathetic fall of the Patriots" dynasty, you will not be alone. In fact, you will have a universe full of company.