Until recently, you would have been right, but no longer. No, sir. The perfect season — in this case, 16-for-16, or 17-for-17, whatever his choice — is not only possible, it’s coming via special delivery.

Make that a very special delivery, as in something that until now would never even have been dreamed of, let alone talked about, lest you be locked up the authorities.

You think about how crazy it sounds — heck, even in his monumental 1945 season when he won 11 in a row and 18 in all, Byron Nelson lost 13 times — and you shake your head. There’s no way even the great Woods can go undefeated in a season? Like the Patriots, he will fall somewhere, somehow, someway along the line?

You will buy stock in fate and the law of averages, and perhaps you are right, but it seems now that an undefeated season is the only logical thing left for Woods.

With his age at 32 and his major count at 13, it’s only a matter of time until he surpasses Jack Nicklaus’s epic mark of 18.

With Woods' bank account enough to bail the country out of debt three or four times over, it’s long since become a comfortable landscape in which he can just focus on the golf.

With his game better than ever, his swing tidier than a country bed ‘n breakfast, his confidence overflowing even from a bottomless well, and the opposition as beaten as a sparring partner, there seems to be no limit for Woods in 2008.

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Consider, for instance, how Woods has won three times in ’08 in three distinct manners. He lapped the field and stormed to an eight-shot triumph at the Buick Invitational. He acted like Houdini to escape a first-round deficit in the Accenture Match Play and eventually won by the ridiculous margin of 8-and-7. At the Arnold Palmer Invitational, he jogged out of the starting blocks, fell a half-mile behind, then dug deep into his reservoir of fortitude and won a shoot-out over a grizzled veteran (Bart Bryant), a nemesis (Vijay Singh), an unheralded chap (Cliff Kresge), and two of America’s best young players (Hunter Mahan and Sean O’Hair).

All this on a week that had begun with McCroskey — er, Woods — uttering, “It looks like I picked the wrong week to work.”

Turns out he didn’t. Turns out it was the right week, after all.

Then again, isn’t there a chance they all will be this year?

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