Driving past on Florida's Turnpike, glancing westward toward a wholly new species of football stadium in the middle of the creation process, it's difficult to imagine that the ultimate payoff won't follow.
Why shouldn't Miami be awarded an upcoming Super Bowl in Tuesday's vote by NFL owners? Dolphins owner Stephen Ross is spending $450 million to eliminate the only legitimate reason why not.
Everything else was in place before Ponce de Leon showed up. The tropical sun. The beaches. The flora, the fauna and the certainty that winter would never pull the plug on paradise.
A few things have changed since then. People came by the millions and those people grew prissier over time until the softest and most powerful among them started demanding total comfort at all times, including at sports events.
And so we evolved from shirtless howlers in the upper deck to swells in suites. From cheering to complaining.
Why, for instance, don't they have better signage leading to valet parking at the Dolphins' stadium? Really, it's an outrage.
And now, really, there's what amounts to a rain and sun bonnet going up over the entire stadium seating area in Miami Gardens.
Can't see the massive open-air canopy just yet. The framework for it is rapidly being bolted together, however, by cranes seemingly tall enough to snag the rising moon and load it on a train to Charlotte, where NFL owners will meet to vote on which cities get the Super Bowls of 2019, 2020 and 2021.
It seems that Ross has done just about everything else to impress his peers with the depth of his commitment.
This stadium makeover wasn't originally a self-funded campaign, remember. The Dolphins urgently asked for taxpayer help from the state but got stiff-armed instead. Public money paid for most of the Miami Marlins' new ballpark, which opened in 2012, and bruising deals like that tend to leave a mark.
So the work goes on, 24 hours a day, with the first of four massive videoboards already in place.
Will Ross be booed this season whenever his smiling face fills those screens? It seems that team owners always are, just for the crime of not winning a championship every year, but in this case it is not deserved.
South Florida was never going to get another Super Bowl unless he stepped up because there always will be grander stadium projects coming on line.
There's one almost ready to open in Atlanta right now ($1.4 billion) and another one ready to break ground in Los Angeles ($2.6 billion), which makes those cities finalists for the dates that Miami wants.
Hey, the league has already committed the 2018 Super Bowl to Minneapolis, which in February is pretty much a suburb of Saskatchewan. NFL owners can't help being drawn to shiny objects, however, and the Vikings are opening a new stadium this year.
What Miami is doing, what Ross is financing, should be more than enough to get back in the Super Bowl rotation, because it's sparkly and it's smart to boot.
There's a cutout in the canopy above the field, after all, which lets the best of Florida in and serves as a reminder that you are, in fact, in Florida. That always will be the best selling point.
Besides, Tampa and New Orleans are on the finalist list, too. Let's be fair.
All Tampa did to improve its stadium in preparation for the vote was to replenish its dispensers with fresh hand sanitizer.
All New Orleans did was to switch out some fuses at the Louisiana Superdome, where the Super Bowl blacked out three years ago.
Bottom line, the Super Bowl has been played in Indiana and New Jersey since its last visit to Miami in 2010. Those were stretches. Getting back to South Florida and Ross' redone digs, and for multiple times in the next 10-15 years, should be a slam dunk.
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