Dan Marino's 17th NFL season came into an ugly end Saturday with a 62-7 loss in Jacksonville.

1.) It's a shame that such a successful pro tenure had to end with a performance that recalled nothing so much as the toll-booth scene in "The Godfather";

2.) Dan Marino absolutely, positively has to be next; and

3.) That's a damned shame, too.

Right, it works out to more than two immediate thoughts. But that's to be expected when the subject is greatness and the subtext is at what point to walk away from it.

Jimmy Johnson had a run in the NFL; Dan Marino had a life in the NFL. There's a huge difference, and all the more reason that it is Marino's retirement -- be it today, tomorrow or, God willing, someday very soon -- that really matters here.

After all, it is Marino who has thrown more passes than anyone in league history. It is Marino who has completed more passes than anyone, for more yards than anyone -- at 61,000-plus, his career total stands a staggering 10,000 yards beyond the great John Elway.

And funny we should mention John Elway. Because it is Elway's own exit -- brilliant, pyrotechnic, perfectly timed -- that makes it so hard to reconcile what Marino has to face up to now.

You root for the good ending in sports, but you do so knowing full well that sports abhors nothing more than a written script. The games, they'll do whatever in the world they want. If they want to send Joe Montana out while lying on a frozen field in Buffalo, dazed and beaten, while wearing that Kansas City uniform that he always looked so ridiculous in, then that's how it'll be. Everybody doesn't get to be Ted Williams, homering in his final at-bat.

Everybody, that is, doesn't get to be Elway.

You look at Elway's finish, and what you see is the way the world should have spun for Dan Marino. Even Marino believed that much; otherwise, he'd have never joined Dolphins owner H. Wayne Huizenga in talking Jimmy Johnson out of retirement during the last offseason, when Johnson officially quit for 24 hours before finally relenting.

Marino wanted another shot at a ring. He wanted the happy ending, the way his friend and longtime peer Elway got it. In some ways, Elway had it worse than Marino; he had managed to guide the Denver Broncos into three Super Bowls, getting a taste of what the good stuff might be like, and then was unceremoniously crushed in each of them.

But in the end, Elway got it right. He got a head coach, Mike Shanahan, who immediately understood that the dynamics of asking Elway to do it all were hopelessly out of whack; and he got a running game. And because the runner turned out to be Terrell Davis, John Elway suddenly found that he had all of that, and more.

Elway quarterbacked the Broncos to the Super Bowl as a wild-card team, and they upset the Packers with Davis doing the heavy lifting. Elway got them back to the next Super Bowl as odds-on favorites, then turned in a game for the ages in his farewell, shredding the Atlanta Falcons for 336 passing yards in last year's 34-19 victory.

Elway was the Most Valuable Player of that game, and its undeniable focal point; there wasn't anything else on the field that remotely compared with the intensity of interest in what the quarterback was doing with every one of those final minutes of the championship. Elway left the stadium that night in a helicopter -- just choppered right out of his own life.

Funny thing about that: It all occurred in Miami.

It was an incredible thing, and it is a rare thing. Dan Marino has said many times that whenever he leaves the NFL, he will leave knowing he has had a full career; but nobody in his right mind wouldn't want to add the Super Bowl ring to the résumé, if for no other reason than the cold eye of history.

It's a great idea; it just doesn't usually work out. In some ways, it's almost a fluke when it does. As silly as it is to compare great passers such as Marino and Elway, isn't it at least acceptable to argue that the Dolphins quarterback would deserve every bit of the fabulous finale that his longtime Denver friend received?

Perfectly acceptable. Dan Marino deserves it. He also won't get it. Jimmy Johnson is gone, Dave Wannstedt is here, the game goes on. Marino is 38 and coming off a year in which he suffered through significant injury and just general awfulness -- the worst QB rating of his career.

He came into the season hoping that he could ride his own adrenaline and Johnson's coaching acumen to one final shot at the big prize. He missed it by, adding things up here, 55 points in Miami's final game of the campaign.

It hurts and, checking the roster of available adjectives, it also blows.

But it's the truth, and for the sake of all parties, Marino will come to accept it. He wished for the grand curtain call, got the hook instead, and there it is.

It stinks, but it such is life. Ask John Elway: They don't make endings like they used to.

Mark Kreidler is a columnist for the Sacramento Bee, which has a web site at http://www.sacbee.com/.