Dolphins fans filled every one of 2,000 bleacher seats and spilled into the aisles at the team's Davie training camp Sunday, happily baking in the sun and dreaming as their team -- the one embedded so deep in South Florida's heart -- opened official practice for its 44th season.

Fans cheered the most meaningless of plays, sent oohs and aahs into the sky like helium balloons and groaned as one over passes dropped.

Hundreds more Dolfans too late to wedge into the standing-room-only bleachers stood ogling from decks of a parking garage in back of the practice fields. Still others peered from outside the only section of surrounding chain link fence not covered by windscreen, lined up three-deep as if along a parade route.

``The most amazing thing I've seen in five years here,'' linebacker Channing Crowder called it.

It looked like faith -- like hungry belief that happy days finally are here again for a franchise forever seeking its first Super Bowl championship since the 1973 season.

There is a disconnect, though, between all of that enthusiasm so palpable Sunday and the reality being described for and assigned to this team for the 2009 season.

The subject of all of this swooning adulation happens to be the most overlooked, under regarded and disrespected division champion in the NFL. By a lot.

Miami's 11-5 record and AFC East title last season might as well have been a mirage. Did it really happen? You wouldn't know it by the low expectations dogging the team into training camp.

AGAINST THE ODDS

The Las Vegas betting over/under on Dolphin wins is a mere 7 ½ victories. That means the experts, the money, is on Miami retreating to mediocrity and failing to even make the playoffs, struggling and losing against a much more difficult schedule.

All of the talk in the AFC East is of New England's resurgence behind a healthy-again Tom Brady. The divisionmate New York Jets, with a new coach and quarterback, are generating more buzz. Even Buffalo is, after signing Terrell Owens.

Miami isn't so much flying under the radar as seen as stumbling under it.

At this time last summer the Dolphins were coming off a 1-15 season and only had to prove they weren't terrible again, that they were better than embarrassing. The bar was so low that even mediocrity would have been a triumph.

Now -- 11-5 apparently having proven astonishingly little -- the Dolphins must show they are good as they like to think they are, and prove that a slide backward is not inevitable.

Disrespect is one of the great, stalwart motivations in sports, and if motivation is fuel, these Dolphins have a full tank, high octane, as work begins toward the Sept. 13 season opener.

They have gone from being embarrassingly bad to being unconvincingly good.

PERCEPTION?

Miami is the only one of six defending division champions being written off as a non-playoff team. That's because of the schedule, but also from a perception that the team caught every lucky break last year, with a soft schedule, with the Wildcat offensive variation a surprise it won't be again this year and with quarterback Chad Pennington having a career year perhaps unlikely to be repeated.

``I don't care to hear about the schedule or what Vegas thinks,'' said Dolphin-again Jason Taylor. ``That means nothing.''

Wrong. To many players it means anger. It means an edge.