One pass got dropped, and another got caught.

Wes Welker, open with a chance to enhance his New England Patriots’ chances of a fourth Super Bowl title (if not clinch it), could not come up with the ball.

Seconds later, Mario Manningham, double-covered, snagged the ball and got his feet down before going out of bounds, and the Giants were on their way to another ring.

For all the other goings-on in Super Bowl XLVI, it ultimately turned on those two plays – a makeable catch squandered, a difficult catch attained.

And by those razor-thin measures, we not only crown champions, but also proclaim or declaim teams, coaches, quarterbacks, entire legacies. A man’s career – heck, his whole life – ends up defined by that single moment.

So Welker, who caught more passes than anyone in the NFL the last five years, is now scarred, and Manningham, like David Tyree before him, need not do another thing in football. Tyree never caught another pass in the NFL after his helmet masterpiece in the Arizona desert. He didn’t have to – his mark in history was safe and permanent.

Just the same, the aftermath has been quite telling. Now Eli Manning and Tom Coughlin are legendary, elite, Canton-bound greats. Now Tom Brady and Bill Belichick are taken to task, as if the three Super Bowls they did win were irrelevant or immaterial.

All because one pass got dropped, and another got caught.

And it goes further, of course. The aftermath gave us yet another reminder of how singularly obnoxious New York and Boston sports can get.

They take it way, way too seriously in these parts. Combine that with a voracious media culture and a false sense of entitlement and self-importance, and the New York-Boston axis can drown out the rest of American sports. Heaven help us if the Rangers and Bruins get together on the ice in the spring, or if two certain (very rich) baseball clubs have another October encounter.

So Brady’s rather beautiful wife, taunted by Giants fans post-game, says one thing about receivers, and now it’s days worth of tabloid screaming and talk-show fodder, to the point where the Patriots, normally tight-lipped about everything, have to deny locker-room friction.

No doubt, the Pats saw what happened to the Red Sox after their September freefall. The subsequent revelations of clubhouse “debauchery”, reported as if they were horrendous crimes against humanity, drove out Terry Francona and Theo Epstein, among other fallout.

Now we’re sure to get months, maybe years of obsessive focus on trivial matters that have little to do with how football games are won or lost.

All because one pass got dropped, and another got caught.

We don’t have to look too far back to find the last major American sports event with high drama in its final act – the World Series, where the Texas Rangers were twice within a strike of its first-ever championship before the St. Louis Cardinals denied them in Game 6 and then won Game 7.

Then, as in the Super Bowl, the difference between ecstasy and despair was ridiculously thin. However, it happened to teams playing in St. Louis and Texas. Think about that.

The ecstasy and despair the Rangers and Cards felt was no different, really, than it was with the Red Sox and Mets in 1986, but from the Texas side of it, I don’t sense the obscene amount of angst, recrimination and piling-on that accompanied the events of a quarter-century ago.

Funny how people in New York and Boston don’t grasp the notion that the pain of a defeat like that is bad enough without endless, mind-numbing reminders to make it worse. There’s no virtue to kicking people when they’re down, a hint for those (with candy bars, among other tools) who want to dog Welker about this for the rest of his natural life.

Still, New York and Boston types can’t help themselves with the excessive praise and excessive blame, so rest assured that Welker and Manningham will receive endless reminders of their moments in the spotlight.

All because one pass got dropped, and another got caught.

Covering sports for a living, I’ve grown to dread the postmortems of big events, especially ones where the outcome could get traced to one play, or one shot, or one mistake, because we focus so much on those single events that we forget to tell the whole story.

Yet it’s an indisputable truth about sports. For all that happens in the course of a game or season, the margin between eternal glory and perpetual heartache can be so small, as it was in this particular Super Bowl, that it can be rather staggering to consider.

One pass got dropped, and another got caught. It’s so simple, and yet so full of meaning, too.