The last time I covered Media Day at the Super Bowl, a Volkswagen pulled up while Peyton Manning was talking about what great teammates he had, and 12 clowns piled out of it.

OK, so not really.

What was real was asking a linebacker from Notre Dame about the strangest thing he’d been subjected to on pro football’s strangest day, and watching him sort of roll his eyes and smirk a little.

“Well, some guy with a hand puppet came up and interviewed me in Spanish,” said Rocky Boiman, an Indianapolis Colt at the time.

Hand-Puppet Guy was one of the major circus acts that year, if you don’t count a certain television reporter with Brigitte Nielsen hair and a leopard-skin top.

Other than that, the weirdness factor was definitely lacking on a day given over to weirdness, and occasional reportage.

Very occasional reportage.

That’s truly the most bizarre thing about Media Day, which happens again today in Indianapolis: It’s not really about the media. Oh, the media will show up – over-under on boom mics: 635 – and the players will show up, and we’ll get to ask our questions. And when Tom Brady answers (“Tom, how do you keep your hair so shiny and manageable?”), several hundred of us will write it down.

Within minutes, the same several hundred of us will tweet this: “Brady says egg yolks, aloe secret to his awesome hair #vidalsassoon.”

In other words, this isn’t a day for exclusives. It’s a day for Hand-Puppet Guy. And reporters dressed in leopard skin. And two refugees from “American Idol” singing, for some unfathomable reason, “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” And people, some of them actual journalists, asking questions you’d never hear outside of, well, Media Day.

One year someone asked Washington Redskins quarterback Doug Williams, who is black, how long he’d been a black quarterback.

Another year (it might have been the same year) someone asked another player (it might have been Williams again) that if he were a tree, what kind of tree would he be?

The year I was there it was Miami and the temperature was about 65 and we were outdoors at Dolphins Stadium, which is located in the trackless wastes halfway between Miami and Fort Lauderdale. I think Ma Barker and her boys hid out there one time. It’s that remote.

Anyway, some of the players were in little booths down on the field – picture the funnel cake stand at Three Rivers Festival and you’ve pretty much got it – and some were scattered around in the stands. That’s where I found Bears tight end Desmond Clark, just in time to hear the Doug Williams Memorial Question of the Day.

“How would you block Chewbacca if he lined up in the slot?” someone asked.

Clark played along.

“I’d probably have to cut (block) him,” he replied.

Then he took a deep breath and said, you know, Media Day pretty much shouted “Super Bowl” more than anything else, with all its weirdness and excess. It is, after all, a football game smothered by a Media Event; how else to explain a spectacle in which more people pay attention to the commercials and halftime show than to the football?

“It’s definitely the Super Bowl,” Clark said, looking around. “They’re not trickin’ us here.”

The 12 clowns from the Volkswagen nodded vigorously in agreement.