After losing the Super Bowl in the 1997 season, Packers general manager Ron Wolf told one of the few mistruths I've ever heard come out of his mouth.  "We're a one-year wonder, just a fart in the wind." It wasn't the first time that I saw Wolf get frustrated with the media following a harsh loss, but it was the most self-condemning words I ever heard him say.

And I suppose, even though I didn't believe it at the time, thinking we had multiple Super Bowl opportunities ahead of us, I guess in a way Ron Wolf was right. 1996 was the only Super Bowl his team won. But that doesn't tell the whole story, of why the G.M. of a "fart in the wind" was selected as an inductee into the Pro Football Hall of Fame last night.

I've long stated that one tiny mistake prevented the Packers from being a dynasty team in the 1990s, and that was Tom Braatz's fault, not Wolf's. Think what might have happened if the Packers had taken Barry Sanders with the second pick in the 1989 draft instead of Tony Mandarich.  Heck, if you were to pick up that 1990s squad that Ron Wolf built and plop it into the middle of the 2010s, I truly believe that teams (even without Sanders) wins three Super Bowls, including this season. The competition was that much stronger in those days.

Just as we call the Civil War "the last of the old wars, and the first of the new," the 1996 Packers were the "last of the old system, the first of the new." The Dallas Cowboys were the last true dynasty team, unphased by the new salary cap and free agency rules. The Denver Broncos under an aging John Elway was the first team to take full advantage of the new system, watching the old guard sink into salary cap hell and creating inventive schemes that maximized the talent they had on the roster.

The 1996 Packers were a little bit of both, passing the baton from the old to the new, mastering both systems at the same time. Wolf purged his roster and carefully drafted for success, managing his salary cap while still dipping into the trade and free agency route to put key pieces in place.

When it was all said and done, only LeRoy Butler remained on the roster from the Infante regime five years prior. A core nucleus of players were selected in the draft and became cost-efficient contributors. But the acquisition of Brett Favre in trade, or the monster signing of Reggie White, or the influx of veteran free agents like Dob Beebe and Santana Dotson who were willing to play for a lesser salary to win a ring? That was lightning in a bottle and can never happen again.

But it built a great team, one that simply faced a better team every playoff season in the Dallas Cowboys. The Cowboys were the equivalent of Michael Jordan's 1993 Bulls, powerful in every way, but acutely aware their days were numbered in a changing league. Without the Cowboys there, I honestly think 1996 would have been their second and possibly third Super Bowl against much better competition than the NFL sees today.

So, while Wolf's Packers had to wait for the Cowboys to eventually peeter out before a clear path to a Super Bowl was attainable, we can't forget the other side of the coin, the gift he left to us.  The Packers made the transition to the new breed of teams, never truly living through a salary cap hell (other than perhaps 2005, Ted Thompson's first season as G.M. when he purged the roster to rebuild from Mike Sherman's lost roster). They learned to maximize the talent they had on the roster and innovate new schemes to make it happen. They learned to build through the draft. When Mike Sherman dipped into the free agency pool, he usually paid for it with negative impacts.

Every head coach the Packers have had since Holmgren served under Wolf's tutelage.  In fact, every G.M. we've had since Wolf has also been a protégé of Wolf himself. The Packers have remained the team to beat in the division for over 20 years and a playoff contender (if not a Super Bowl favorite) every season.

That's a lot more than a fart in the wind. Go and ask every other team in the NFL besides the Patriots how hard it is to maintain that kind of momentum for  even five years, much less 23. Wolf probably could have been a decent candidate for the the Hall of Fame for simply taking a small-market team that had been mired in misery for 23 years, and his legacy has matched that length of time, long after his retirement.

It was a perfect storm for the Packers, and Ron Wolf took complete advantage of it. He used the sleepy Packer Hall of Fame as a recruiting tool, opened up the coffers that the franchise had been sitting on for years and invested, figured out the new free agency and salary-cap rules in both the short and long term, and turned a perpetual laughingstock of a team and gave it legendary faces again, much as we saw in the Lombardi years.

Today, instead of Mike, Brett, and Reggie as our "first-name basis" faces of the franchise, we have Mike, Aaron, and Clay. The franchise is as successful as it has ever been since the Lombardi Era, and every season the Packers are much-watch television on a national level. A cottage industry, including this website, has sprung up around Green Bay and on the internet, generating millions and millions of dollars and revenue even in the midst of the greatest recession since 1929, and yet all dependent on the Packers being a playoff threat despite starting out 0-0, year in and year out.

The legacy of Ron Wolf (and of course, Bob Harlan, his team President) is evident every season, something we now take for granted, something those under 30 years old can't even imagine any other way. Yet you only have to take a drive across any of our state lines to see teams that would trade everything they have for an ounce of the success the Packers have enjoyed the last 23 years.

Heck, they'd even settle for a fart in the wind.

I'm glad Ron Wolf never settled for that, even if he bemoaned it on one dark day. Even as we still recover from another dark day two weeks ago and wonder if 2010 was just another "fart in the wind," the ongoing success of this team should never be in question. Perhaps, like Brett Favre, Aaron Rodgers is destined to never win more than one Super Bowl in Green Bay.

But would you trade a second Lombardi Trophy in 1995 for a subsequent 20-year drought like the Bears or Vikings have suffered through?

Neither would I. Tomorrow, the Packers are 0-0 again, and will be among the top teams projected to challenge for the Super Bowl, again.

Thank you, Ron Wolf.