TEMPE, Ariz. -- Seventy-thousand-plus Arizona Cardinals fans wore jerseys, sweatshirts, T-shirts and caps to their team's improbable NFC championship conquest Sunday, but all that laundry must be in the wash. Because when you venture into the Valley of the Sun looking for Super Bowl electricity, looking for Cardinals fans, you see mostly a couple of billboards, a handful of car flags, fewer bumper stickers for their Redbirds than for Obama, and, in three days, just one Anquan Boldin No. 81 wandering 44th Street.

You know the fans are out there. You can hear them breathing.

You can sense they're buying, too. Super Bowl and playoff merchandise, team-store manager Percy Silva said, is selling at two to three times its normal pace, or at least what passes for normal among a metropolitan area of 3.7 million people -- America's fifth-largest. And it is filled with transplanted residents â€" between 44,000 and 100,000 arriving each year in the 2000s, according to the U.S. Census.

You can feel they're attempting to come to grips and come out of shock as well, fans of a franchise that surpassed its previous 87 seasons' scant output of two total playoff victories by piecing together three victories in a row in January to wrest the Cardinals (12-7) a spot against the Steelers (14-4) in Super Bowl XLIII Feb. 1. It's quite an emotional temperature change in a desert paradise known for its 100-degree heat. No humidity and no hardware. No rain and no reign.

"Driving around, you don't see it, 'cause they just jumped on board, a lot of them," said famed fan Mad Jack Corson, 50, of Chandler, Ariz., a Phoenix suburb "No, they're here. They're just under the radar."

"When [Bill] Bidwill's son took over the reins and asked for a new stadium [approved by voters in 2000], that brought new hope to the Valley," added Darrell Thompson, 45, a fan from North Phoenix, referring to Michael Bidwill assuming control of the team from his father. " I think there is a small, hard-core base of 5,000 to 10,000 fans. However, there are a lot of closet fans that hoped and prayed the Cardinals would get to this point. But we are in uncharted territory. This is all new to us and [has] caught this city off guard. All I know is, everywhere I have been going, I am starting to see the Cardinals' colors pop up."

Some of that red still seems to be tinged with lingering bitterness over the Bidwills, who moved the team to the Southwest in 1988 after 24 mostly losing years in St. Louis.

Jeff Quinn, 46, was born and raised in the northeast section of the wide, 517-square-mile swath of Valley and lives in Danbury, Conn., nowadays, but carried his grudge with him.

The National Basketball Association's Phoenix Suns for so long were the locals' No. 1 team, Mr. Quinn said, standing outside the Cardinals training facility the other day and looking over merchandise at the temporary trailer parked outside. "Now, of course, it's the Cardinals.

He spoke with disdain of the father Bill Bidwill, but said he likes son, Mike.

"They were lucky to get the stadium built [in a narrow-vote victory]. They finally put the right coaches together, … got the right players and spent some money. Look what's happened."

"He's been treated unfairly," Mr. Corson said of the elder Bidwill, "but he hasn't helped himself, either."

"Man, [Cardinals fans] suffered for so long," said Randy Walters, who was reared in Monongahela but has spent the past 34 years in Arizona and the past three as a Cardinals season-ticket holder once the University of Phoenix Stadium opened in 2006. "They always supported the players. I always supported the players. But I hate the Bidwills. Hate them with a passion. They never gave these people a product."

Sure, Mr. Walters will tell you how he really feels: He's a Steelers fan first and foremost, as one look at his Pittsburgh Willy's gourmet-hotdog stand shows you. The shop inside a Chandler, Ariz., antique mall is festooned with a Mike Webster jersey, a larger-than-life cut-out of a pass-rushing Mean Joe Greene and other black-and-gold baubles. But after two Cardinals seasons in the new-stadium stands with three buddies, they had had enough. They wrote a letter of complaint, said Mr. Walters, 55, and announced they were dropping their tickets in protest.

The team's chief operating officer, Ron Minegar, invited them to the Cardinals' Tempe facility and sat them down.

The way Mr. Walters remembered it, Mr. Minegar spoke passionately about how the team had transformed into a new, winning attitude -- even though the franchise had but one winning season in its prior 20 rattlesnake-bit seasons in the desert.

" 'If you trust me, give us one more year,' " Mr. Walters recalled Mr. Minegar saying. "He lived up to his promise. I still hate the Bidwills. I'm glad the Cardinals are in there. If the Steelers have to lose to anybody, I'm glad it could be the Cardinals. But I still want to get my sixth" Steelers' Super Bowl triumph.

And, for the record, Mr. Walters offered what sounded like an apt contrast: "A football fan in Arizona is seasonal, and the Pittsburgh fan is year-round."

Some of these bandwagon Cardinals followers are turncoats and transplants.

"A couple of weeks ago when the Vikings came here, half those people [in the Cardinals' stadium] were wearing purple" for Minnesota, said Dennis Danner, 31, a fan from Safford, Ariz., closer to New Mexico than Phoenix in an Arizona hinterlands with 45 people per square mile compared to 333 in the Valley. "Now they're back in their red and white."

Fire? Oh, yeah, Cardinals fans have that. Two, in fact, were arrested over it.

Rex Perkin, 37, and Ryan Hanlon, 28, were nabbed Saturday about 18 hours after they, police said, used diesel fuel to burn into the Chandler lawn of Philadelphia quarterback Donovan McNabb the following messages: "Go Cards," "Go Kurt," and "I (heart) AZ."

In Mr. Perkin's mugshot, he wore a black Cardinals cap.