Overreact? The media?

Well, yes. When you’re writing instant history there’s a tendency to do that.

Five minutes after something happens, we’re required to weave what everybody’s just seen into the grand tapestry of everything that has ever happened. Immediacy has a tendency to warp perspective.

Look back just eight days ago at what most of us who cover NASCAR were saying about Dale Earnhardt Jr. and his race team.

The No. 8 Chevrolet had been junk at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. Earnhardt Jr. was in and out of the garage all day in the UAW DaimlerChrysler 400. He finished so far behind, he could have run until midnight and not caught up to race winner Matt Kenseth.

Just two races earlier, after Earnhardt Jr. won just about everything there was to win at Daytona, we were writing about how he and his team looked poised to win this year’s Nextel Cup title. After Las Vegas, though, we couldn’t come up with enough ways to say how bad they were and how clearly they lacked what it took to be champions.

So, after winning Sunday’s Golden Corral 500 at Atlanta Motor Speedway, now what?

Four races into 2004, Earnhardt Jr. has already won the biggest race of the Nextel Cup circuit and also has won at a non-restrictor plate track. He didn’t win a non-plate race until November of 2003. He also got a top-five finish at Rockingham, historically one of his worst tracks, giving him three top-five finishes in four races and putting him third in the early points standings.

It’s too early to declare that Earnhardt Jr. and his team have answered all of their questions. But Sunday’s victory certainly showed that, at least this time around, Earnhardt Jr. and his team passed their biggest test so far.

Instead of panicking, the team went to work. It washed the Las Vegas memory out of its collective hair by testing at Kentucky Motor Speedway and Bristol Motor Speedway. Before going to Darlington on Friday they’ll travel to Texas for more testing.

Earnhardt Jr. said he wasn’t “too bent out of shape” over the Las Vegas debacle anyway. All it did, he said, was make him remember something his father, seven-time Cup champion Dale Earnhardt, told him one time.

“I was a rookie… and I was in Rockingham,” Earnhardt Jr. said. “We took a provisional to start the race. I was really down in the dumps. My daddy and I sat down in his bus and he looked at me and he said, ‘You’ll have days like this and tomorrow you might win the race. Don’t ever let it get you down because the next day can be the greatest day you’ll ever have.'”