It's been many moons since the heartland had a Super Bowl all to itself.

The last time was in 1970, when quarterback Len Dawson led the Kansas City Chiefs past the Minnesota Vikings, 16-0. The associated Roman numeral was IV, the site was Tulane Stadium in New Orleans, and the NFL's great bragging point came from the record attendance: More than 80,000 people paid an average of roughly $47 to see two Corn Belt teams battle for glory.

What followed was 36 years of title games where at least one team hailed from a "glamour" city — many times Miami, sundry San Franciscos, numerous New Yorks. There were plenty of parades in the Big "D," a few benders on the Beltway; even L.A. got itself a title during the Raiders' sojourn there.

To be fair, there were a few Midwestern teams to make the big game in the interim, and a few even came away with the Lombardi Trophy. But none did it against their middle-America brethren.

Not that it much matters. This isn't like the World Series, where Fox executives can openly root for the Yankees and Dodgers without shame.

Thing is, media markets just don't drive Super Bowl ratings these days — that little wrinkle was ironed out sometime in the early 1980s, when the Super Bowl morphed into America's Shiniest Object, a hypnotic spectacle of muscle and marketing, and a de facto national holiday for meatheads and milquetoasts, sports nuts and sports haters alike.

So what's the satisfaction in shutting out the East Coast entitlement mentality, the West Coast indifference complex, and the football-lives-here cock-a-doodle-doo of the sunny South?

Well, it's a tiny atonement, to be sure.

But as anyone from as high up on the prairie as I am knows, you gotta take advantage of every opportunity to point out that yes, there is cause to look down once in awhile when flying over "Flyover Country."

(And no, my Vikings don't qualify right now.)

THE CONTENDERS

The Bears are still the Monsters of the Midway, even 21 years after they shuffled into the title game to win a laugher against New England. They are unglamorous and blue collar in every way, winning game after game on grit and guile and brute, bludgeoning force.

But that's Bears football, a style that reflects the city in many ways, where people with pointy surnames of jumbled consonants and clipped, nasal speech could be beef barons, or slaughterhouse workers, or taxi drivers or sausage kings. You can't tell them apart for their Urlacher jerseys. These are da Bears fans, just the same.

About three hours south on I-65, through the rank factory belchings of Gary, Ind., past the cornfields of West Lafayette, the cornfields of Frankfort and the cornfields of Lebanon, lies Indianapolis. Here, the streets are always clean, there's a new Bible verse on the banner of the daily newspaper and basketball trumps all.

The Colts are beloved here, if not revered; little about their cerebral finesse game speaks to the local atmosphere of Hoosier hospitality and sober quietude. Peyton Manning is the undisputed leader, who's really a Cajun by way of Tennessee rather than Hoosier, a player in the mold of field general that was cast when Johnny Unitas played for the Colts of Baltimore.

Yet despite all these cultural and aesthetic differences, despite the proximity and potential for inferiority/superiority complexes, Chicago and Indianapolis are hardly rivals — in football or otherwise. They are like different worlds, really — one packed with great restaurants, world class museums and lively neighborhoods, the other doin' just fine, thanks, with its milder traditions of prep sports mania and oval racing on Memorial Day weekend.

This is the diversity of the Midwest, which I can say from experience isn't as homogenous as perhaps advertised.

BY THE NUMBERS

How likely is it, then, that nearly four decades should pass before two Midwestern teams come to meet in the Super Bowl? Or that this is only the third time ever? (The first just so happened to be Super Bowl I: Green Bay 35, Kansas City 10.)

For sake of argument, my fuzzy calculus goes something like this:

There are four Midwestern teams in the AFC: Cincinnati, Cleveland, Kansas City and Indianapolis.

The NFC has five: Chicago, Detroit, Green Bay, Minnesota and St. Louis.

That group would, by my reasoning, produce 20 possible combinations of a "Midwestern" Super Bowl.

In the entire NFL, the 16 teams in either conference gives us 256 possible matchups total.

Not taking into account realignment, expansion and differing levels of parity throughout the NFL's history (because that would require an actuary scientist), it would stand to reason mathematically that a Midwestern Super Bowl should occur roughly once every 12 years.

Waaait a minute.

That means that of 41 Super Bowls so far, this phenomenon should only have happened ... thrice.

So it turns out that the drought was merely evening-out the equation. We Midwesterners will have to wait until at least Super Bowl 48 — and then keep our mouths shut until the 60th — before it happens again, lest we throw the NFL universe into imbalance.

So, no Vikings-Chiefs rematch next year, eh? No Bengals-Packers, or — God forbid — Lions-Browns?

On second thought, let's get this Bears-Colts thing over with and move on.

Keep flying, folks! Nothing more to see here.

Josh Dickey is asap's Sections Editor, and a native Minnesotan now based in New York. His planes always seem to land in the Midwest.

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