It's no longer a question of parity. The NFL has got all the parity it can handle. It has parity coming out of its parities. The whole world is seven up and five down, give or take a game, and as Ye Olde Book of Sports Clichés instructs us, we could throw a blanket over these teams.

	How quickly the mighty fall. Kurt Warner and the Rams aren't what they have been in recent seasons.

And that's the thing: We just might want to.

Ask not the question of parity. It has been answered with a powerful, all-encompassing "We got it" for a few years now. Last season's St. Louis Rams are this season's St. Louis Rams, much in the same way that this season's Super Bowl entrant-to-be is quite likely next year's .500, playoff-scrambling entry. (And leave Kurt Warner out of this; the Rams weren't winning with him, either.) It's a one-or-two-and-done on the title-chase scene almost everywhere you look.

Parity has had its say. The salary cap has had its utterly intended effect, which is to eliminate the habit of teams assembling dynastic models of success and replace it with the popular Anyone Can Win! notion, borrowed lovingly from your nearest Lotto outpost.

It's a done deal, and it's no longer the question. Instead ask the question of memorability.

Ask whether in two or three years anyone outside the local fanatic base will be able to remember who won the conferences, much less who contributed to those championships. Ask not so much where the dynasties are, but where a team resides that you'll be able to recall in 24 months.

Ask this: Do memories count for anything in sports today?

I grew up nowhere near Pittsburgh and never once rooted for the Steelers in any capacity, but those Bradshaw-Swan-Harris-Lambert-Greene years are etched into my sports consciousness. The Dallas Cowboys? Landry and Meredith and then Morton and then Staubach, Bobby Hayes and Jethro Pugh and Walt Garrison all thrown together, just seemingly years and years of winning with the same batches of people -- not merely the same core, but very substantially the same roster at most of the skill positions.

For all I know, the players regard those as the bad old days of indentured servitude, before the wonders of the controlled open market and cautious free agency. From a fan's perspective, those days were gold. You didn't have to ask who the Miami Dolphins were this year; you knew.

It sounds nostalgic; in fact, I think it's closer to the heart of things than the league might care to admit. What parity has brought to the the NFL of a beneficial nature is almost entirely self-evident, and it includes the part about so many teams being able to claim themselves still in the running for postseason glory this late in the year. But, just as certainly, there is a cost, even if it seems more ethereal and harder to grasp.

And maybe that cost is memory. Maybe the cost is the kind of memory that leads people to tell and write stories about classic teams and the great matchups, now less likely as those teams quickly disintegrate under the realities of the salary cap and franchises' flagging ability to retain their foundational talent under the structure.

It comes; it goes. The Ravens came and went. The Rams made it a couple of good years. The Patriots jumped up last season and went on an inspired run. It doesn't exactly put you in mind of the Chicago Bulls, now, does it?

Football, of course, is a tough case in this regard. No one, not even a superior quarterback, can change a game the way a Michael Jordan can turn a basketball game. But, again, the conversation here isn't so much about efficiency as about memory.

The Bulls and Jordan will be remembered as long as the NBA is standing. The issue with the Yankees, from my perspective, was never about them winning but rather about the mechanics of baseball's screwed-up money system under which they did that winning. The World Series titles themselves were, I'd argue, almost entirely to the good, because dynasties, no matter how frustrating to some fans in the short run, are good for sports.

Consistently winning teams create sports memory. You don't hear anybody in the NBA crowing about the fact that the Lakers are off to a lousy start, because the league is savvy enough to understand that another title-threatening L.A. team is a good thing. It gives some people an image to root for and the rest of the people one to root against -- and, in both cases, it gives them a team to remember.

That team doesn't exist in the NFL just now; I'll take your Tampa Bay and see you my Green Bay, or match your Raiders with the Colts. Whatever; it's all about the same. And, come January, somebody's going to walk out of that sameness with a Super Bowl trophy. The question in the age of parity, really, is whether anybody will remember it.

Mark Kreidler is a columnist with the Sacramento Bee and a regular contributor to ESPN.com