Want to see tomorrow's team today?

Let's begin in the heretofore unknown football hotbed known as the RCA Dome. Opening day against the Bills, Peyton Manning, last year's rookie phenom, and Edgerrin James, this year's model, give shell-shocked Colts fans reason to hope that the team's days as the NFL version of the Italian Army are over. And when James doesn't get the ball, Manning goes to his other silent weapon, 27-year-old elder statesman Marvin Harrison, who runs the risk of losing his Man behind the Iron Face Mask anonymity. 31-14, Colts. Youth must be served.

Right? Well, almost. Don't forget the growing pains, and we don't mean Kirk Cameron. Take the New England game, Week 2. At halftime, it's 28-7. Manning is 14-for-17, 209 yards. In the press box, scribes, like a pack following an insurgent presidential campaign, squawk into telephones, telling their editors: The Colts are The Story.

Then comes the second half. The offense regresses to an unholy time when Jack Trudeau and Albert Bentley wore horseshoes. There are missed assignments on defense and ugly turnovers. James coughs up his second fumble in two weeks on his own 35. And the defense, an expensive collection of name-tag-wearing free agents, crumples like a losing lottery ticket. Colts die, 31-28.

Afterward, Manning faces the boom mikes. His face is alabaster, sprinkled with tiny specks of sweat, as if he's barely survived a fiery car crash. He tries to explain the debacle, one that looked an awful lot like last year's 13 losses. "You can say all you want, don't let up, don't let up," Peyton whispers. "But talk is cheap. You have to go out and do it, and we didn't do it." The press hordes make other plans for Week 3. There are unbeaten teams to follow.

So the Colts trudge to San Diego with little fanfare. It looks like the same old story. A 10-point lead is blown. A punt botched. Even James is bottled up. But Manning keeps at it. But Junior Seau and the boys know where the QB is going, Manning and Harrison hook up repeatedly. The unsung Syracuse grad, sometimes choosing to use only one hand, catches 13 Manning missiles for 196 yards and a TD. By the time the California sun sets, Manning has twirled for 404 yards on 54 attempts. Best ever for a Colt -- and that includes Johnny U. Indy is 2-1.

Afterward, Manning's face has a little more color than usual. "Somebody in the locker room was saying, 'Who said we're a young football team now?'" he says with his Opie grin. "We don't like hearing we're the most improved football team. We want to be known as a good football team." Press reservations flow in for the Miami game in Week 5. Who knows? Maybe tomorrow's team is here today.

***

It's not true. Peyton Manning does have a sense of humor. When asked whether he knows New Orleans neighbor/rock doomster Trent Reznor, he quips, "Oh, yeah, my dad goes over there and jams with him every night."

Peyton can afford to smile now. He's got some players. It's not that the Colts didn't try hard last year, they just didn't have a lot of, uh, talent. Those days are gone. Team president Bill Polian's on a roll. In '98, he grabbed Manning over Leaf, ignoring the naysayers who thought Manning was too fragile for the NFL. Next, he dealt Marshall Faulk, explaining that the league's top total-yardage back would be too old by the time the Colts got good. (This worried the Colts faithful, since Faulk is only 26. When was Indy going to be good, 2010?) Then, turning down Ditka's nutty ransom of draft picks, he bypassed Ricky and took Edgerrin with the fourth pick in the '99 draft.

By now, every one of the 14 remaining Colts fans was mad: Polian had taken the wrong dreadlocked dude. But in preseason, James ripped through the Saints defense while an injured Ricky sat on the sidelines looking lonesome for some doughnuts (he's still looking that way, having gotten up for only 204 yards in three games since that day). After the first series in the Saints exhibition, placid Peyton got on the phone with QB coach Bruce Arians and said of James, "Woo. This guy is the real deal. He's a player."

James' ground attack has proven a lethal complement to Manning and Harrison's aerial show. His running gives Manning's play-action fakes more street cred, freezing safeties and allowing Harrison to run by unprotected cornerbacks for 28 catches, 422 yards and 6 TDs.

Franco, Terry and Lynn; Troy, Emmitt and Michael; Peyton, Edgerrin and Marvin?

Let's start in the backfield. A man needs a woman. A quarterback needs a running back. Going solo isn't nearly as much fun. Just ask Marino. On the surface, Manning and James have little in common: one the child of privilege, the other a product of poverty. But in a football sense, they are soul brothers. "It'd be hard to find two people who came from such totally different backgrounds," says coach Jim Mora. "Yet both of them are coachable and have a work ethic that you don't see a lot."

After his holdout, which ended just before the second preseason game, James would often be the first employee at the Colts' complex, rolling in around 6 a.m. and firing up the coffee machine. Why so diligent?

"I hate getting yelled at, that'll get you on my bad side," says James, wearing a gold cross, a Timberland sweatshirt and a ski cap over his unruly locks. "My mom never yelled at me. She just told us what needed to be done and we did it. If I do my part, know my assignments, no one is going to yell at me."

James' directional sense has been crucial to his early development. He's no Barry Sanders, lollygagging behind the line of scrimmage, not since his running back coach at Miami, Don Soldinger, got his ear. "I still hear his voice: 'Go north-south, go north-south,'" James says with a laugh. "Even if you made a good run, after the game he'd take you into a room and measure out how far you ran to just make a few yards. He pointed out all that wasted energy. After a while, it just became common sense."

But James picked up his best advice from a Cowboy. On draft day, he got a call from fellow Florida homeboy and hero Deion Sanders. "Deion called me up and told me, 'You have to develop a good relationship with Peyton. You guys gonna be together, it only makes sense to work well together.'"

James has taken that to heart. Asked if Manning's been a big help, he lights up a gold-toothed grin. "Yeah, he has. He knows everything everybody's doing on offense. They should give him double salary."

***

In the off-season, Peyton Manning committed an unnatural act. He took a break from football. Offensive coordinator Tom Moore ordered him to spend a month away from the field. First, he and dad Archie went duck hunting in Mississippi in January. Then he goofed around at the rookie Pro Bowl festivities in Hawaii, until Patriots running back Robert Edwards' flag football knee injury proved a major buzz kill. But come March, Manning and his receiving corps were back home in Indiana working out. Because of NFL rules, Manning had been prevented from doing that as a rookie.

"We took one play a day, from every angle" says Manning. "We went out there and said, 'Okay, we're gonna throw 18-yard comeback routes.' Then we did it against every situation, vs. press coverage, vs. off coverage, vs. zone coverage, against blitz, any kind of look we could get. Now, during the season, when we see different looks, we can go, 'Hey, remember blitz, 18-yard comeback? Break it off at 15.'"

To Marvin Harrison, it was a prophecy coming true. "Last year against the Patriots, me and Peyton messed up on a crossing pattern near the end of a game," he says. "Bill Polian came up to me and said, 'Don't worry, you'll work on it in the off-season and it won't happen next year.' He was right. Now we know what each of us is going to do before we do it, just because we practiced it so much. It might just be a look from Peyton, but we know what to do."

The off-season toil paid off. Many of Peyton's TD passes have come on audibles and route adjustments made at the line. Against the Chargers, Manning noticed the safety playing up against the run, gave his pants a simple hitch, and Harrison adjusted to a fly pattern for a 46-yard gain. Somehow, Manning's knowledge of the Colts offense continues to grow exponentially. His receivers know he's the Answer Guy of formations.

"He's a coach on the field," says Colts receiver E.G. Green. "We're always going, 'Hey P, what route I got on this. Hey P, what I got to do on this?' He may not always be right, but as long as we're on the same page, it works out."

Completing the package, Manning's throws have become crisper. While some of the improvement comes from an off-season of long tosses into nets to increase his arm strength, most of it is better fundamentals.

"When he came back, we watched a lot of film from last year," says QB coach Arians. "'Let's look at your three-step drop, let's look at the five-step drop. Look at the angle of your plant foot on this good throw, look at it on this poor one.' Then he made the adjustments."

Maybe one reason Manning plays like a seasoned vet is that he's taken every single snap in practice and in games with the first team since he arrived in Indy. "We joke that our backup quarterbacks will be arriving straight from detox," says Arians, "because they're coming in cold turkey."

All this progress has Manning enjoying himself more the second time around. "Last year, I'd let losses stick with me all week," he says. "I'd be real moody, not pleasant to be around. I wasn't used to losses after college. At Tennessee, you lose one game and your season was basically over. Here, it's not. Now I know you have to let them go. You never get used to losing, but you have to move ahead." Manning pauses for a second and grins. "Then again, if you don't lose, you don't have to worry about it."

Manning has flourished behind an impossibly young offensive line, anchored by '97 No. 1 pick Tarik Glenn, that did not allow a sack through Week 3. It's clear the quality control set by Manning rubs off on the trench guys. "It's fun playing in this offense. You got guys like Peyton, Edgerrin and Marvin who can make big plays," says Glenn. "It motivates you to play up to their level. You want to make sure you're not the one guy lacking or slacking."

With James, a strong inside runner able to convert tough third-and-3 situations that Faulk couldn't, Manning has a deadly new tool in his arsenal. And that's before factoring in the invisible man, Harrison. While putting up Rice-like numbers, Harrison's taken a back seat to the Manning and James hype machine. "That's all right, I'm used to it," Harrison says. "It's something I've been living with all my life. Even coming out of Syracuse, Terry Glenn was at Ohio State. I was always overshadowed. Now you've got Terry and Keyshawn in my division. But I believe my time will come."

And like the rest of the Colts, that time could be soon.

But how soon? While the defense has been upgraded with the signings of high-priced free agents like linebacker Cornelius Bennett, defensive end Chad Bratzke and safety Chad Cota, how they will gel as a unit is still an unwritten story: will they be zone-blitzing mad dogs, as they were against Buffalo, or just plain old dogs, as they were against New England? No one knows. But you can bet the Speedway that Bill Polian takes a defensive stud early in the 2000 draft. The offense will cruise, except for nagging concerns about James' long-term health. Through the first three games, no other Colts running back had a single carry and Edgerrin was on a 400-carry pace.

But mostly, it's about these guys still teething -- and hurting people while they do. They could as easily win 11 as lose 11. Mora knows it. The Tuesday following the New England loss, the 64-year-old coach couldn't sleep.

"I woke up at 4 a.m. concerned I came down on them too hard during film," he says. "Maybe I put too much emphasis on things they did wrong, rather than did good. It's a fine line there. You don't want to break their will, but at the same point, this is the NFL. They say Edgerrin fumbled, but he's only a rookie. Hell, he's an NFL running back. If he fumbles, he's got to know it's not okay to fumble. At the same time, I have to allow for inexperience. But I don't want to use youth as an excuse."

Mora takes a breath and smiles. "So how do I handle it? I don't know."

Hey, Jim, chill. The kids are all right.

This article appears in the October 18, 1999 issue of ESPN The Magazine.