San Diego ? The Tampa Bay Buccaneers are in the Super Bowl, and they just might have the NFL’s greatest defense ever. The offense isn’t too bad, either.

Twenty years ago, the above paragraph was inconceivable. Ten years ago, it would have given legitimate grounds for a sanity test.

The Bucs of old wore creamsicle orange jerseys and had a strange pirate on their helmets. They also had an owner, Hugh Culverhouse, whose 1976 expansion team lost its first 26 games and, except for a stunning trip to the 1979 NFC Championship, got worse.

It was by design. Culverhouse was a businessman first and foremost, and those were the days before the NFL had a salary cap that also features a minimum payroll amount for each team. Culverhouses’s payroll was almost always the lowest in the league and so were his win totals, but his profits were the highest. Double-digit losses were the norm after Culverhouse let franchise quarterback Doug Williams depart after a dispute over a few thousand dollars. Culverhouse also kept San Francisco’s dynasty alive by trading Steve Young to the 49ers.

Crowds of 25,000 showed up to see the likes of Steve DeBerg, Tyji Armstrong and Booker Reese. The only sellouts came when Green Bay came to the old Tampa Stadium and there was as much green and yellow in the stands as on a typical day at Lambeau Field.

The turnaround started in 1995 after Culverhouse died and his family sold the team to Malcolm Glazer.

Glazer’s first act as owner of the Bucs was to hold Tampa, Fla., hostage. In a quest for a new stadium, Glazer flirted with Orlando, Baltimore, Sacramento, Cleveland, Los Angeles, San Antonio and Peoria, Ill.

It worked and Tampa taxpayers built glitzy Raymond James Stadium, complete with a pirate ship. That’s about the same time the Bucs stopped being the NFL’s Titanic.

A concept Glazer embraced that Culverhouse didn’t was you have to spend money to make money. He brought in coach Tony Dungy and started handing big contracts to players such as Warren Sapp, Derrick Brooks, John Lynch, Mike Alstott and Keyshawn Johnson.

Glazer leaves the football part to his sons, who are the unsung heroes as the Bucs play the Oakland Raiders in Super Bowl XXXVII on Sunday.

They stayed in the background and let Dungy and general manager Rich McKay, the son of Tampa Bay’s first coach, John McKay, build the Bucs into a consistent winner. That’s why the Glazer sons did the unthinkable after a playoff loss to Philadelphia last year. They fired Dungy, the only winning coach in franchise history.

The Glazers gave up the farm (four draft picks and $8 million) to get Jon Gruden from the Raiders. That drew snickers around the league, and there was speculation the Bucs would become a laughingstock again.

They haven’t. Gruden has done what Dungy couldn’t,and the Bucs are in their first Super Bowl. The team that buried those orange jerseys is getting the last laugh.