Miami ? Peyton Manning could have said something along the lines of, “How do you like me now?”

Or held up the Lombardi Trophy and the keys to the luxury car they give to the Super Bowl most valuable player and said, “This validation enough for you?”

But he didn’t.

Even in the aftermath of the Colts’ 29-17 victory over the Bears – a victory in which Manning completed 25 of 38 passes for 247 yards and a TD – Manning still dodged and ducked the issue of whether he needed a Super Bowl victory to validate everything else he has accomplished in nine NFL seasons.

“Like I’ve said, I’ve never played that card, never played that game,” Manning said. “It’s great to be on a championship team. I’ve put a lot of work into it, but a lot of people have put a lot of work into it.”

So it was left to Colts coach Tony Dungy to go right at the issue.

“Maybe people will say now, ‘Well, if he doesn’t win two in a row, that’s not good enough,'” Dungy said. “Peyton Manning is a tremendous player. He prepares, he works, he does everything that you can do to win ball games and lead your team. If people think he had to win a Super Bowl to know that and validate that and justify it, that is just wrong. But he’s done that now, it’s behind him, and I don’t think there’s anything you can say now other than this guy is a Hall of Fame player and one of the greatest players to ever play the game.”

“I don’t think he needed this for personal vindication,” Dungy added. “Certainly I didn’t look at it this way. I just looked at if we kept fighting, eventually we’d get our championship.”

The Colts did a lot of that “we” talk late Sunday night, and with good reason.

Indianapolis quarterback Peyton Manning (18) looks to hand off. Manning threw one touchdown and earned the MVP award in the Colts' Super Bowl victory Sunday in Miami.

All last week, this Super Bowl was going to be about the quarterbacks.

It was going to be about Peyton Manning vs. Rex Grossman in a nice, neat package, and nobody – not Brian Urlacher, not even Adam Vinatieri, who seems to show up in the equation a lot – was going to get in the way.

On Sunday, however, a lot of people stepped into the equation on the way to Colts 29, Bears 17.

The rain got involved, too, by contributing to turnovers and impacting strategy.

“Obviously, the passing game wasn’t going to be as sharp because of the weather,” Manning said. “In the red zone, you didn’t want to get into the kind of situation where you’d have a ball getting tipped. So we kept the ball on the ground a lot more on third downs.”

Manning still got his Super Bowl ring. He still put up big numbers.

Yet the Colts did not win Super Bowl XLI simply because of him.

The Colts won because they eventually played well on defense.

They won because they cleaned up their special teams play, which was awful early in the evening.

They won because they were able to run the football.

And yes, they also won because Manning was on their side, and they put Grossman into the position of having to make plays in the fourth quarter that he could not make.

Manning was still put up on the pedestal-like structure in the middle of the field where they handed Colts owner Jim Irsay and Dungy the Lombardi Trophy, because they handed him the keys to the MVP’s car.

But nobody knew better than Manning that the car easily could have gone to any number of his teammates.

“We won as a team,” Manning said. “Everybody did their part.”

Including a defense that forced five turnover.

“Certainly, it changes your frame of mind,” Manning said. “You think maybe you don’t have to be as aggressive. Maybe you can (play more cautiously) on third down because the defense is going to create turnovers and get the ball back.”