Came out of a middle-of-the-night coma long enough, here in the Land on the Other Side of the World, and saw all but 15 points of Super Bowl 48 on some once-only, no-cost streaming video from Fox.

Pete Carroll coached the winning Seattle Seahawks team, and he bucked some actuarial odds, and also reached the zenith of his career — at the comparatively advanced age (among football coaches) of 62.

This interests me in a couple of ways.

Pete becomes the third-oldest man to coach a winning Super Bowl team, behind Tom Coughlin, who was 65 when he won a Super Bowl for the second time, and Dick Vermiel (who was 63).

It was only a few years ago that it was posited by writers such as Bill Simmons that coaches were unlikely to win NFL championships past the age of 55 and, back then, he had a lot of history to back up that assertion. Suggesting most coaches peaked before 50.

However, four of the past 15 winning coaches were the aforementioned gentleman — after only one sexagenarian (Weeb Ewbank of the New York Jets) coached the winning SB team in the first 33 stagings of the game.

(Vince Lombardi seemed quite old, when he led the Packers to two victories, but he was only 54 when he won the second.)

So, maybe we have established a trend of men on the high side of 60 being able to win NFL championships.

(Though I often have wondered how anyone on the high side of 50, even, can stand the enormous pressure of standing on a football sideline, week after week — never mind at the NFL level, even the high school level. I couldn’t do it. But the fact is, some guys clearly can, and perhaps more than ever before.)

The second notion I have been thinking about is this “peak of our lives” topic I have mulled for years — even before the New York Times printed an op-ed piece from a Clemson philosophy professor about the potential melancholia attendant to “peaking” when we are young, which potentially relegates the rest of our lives to lengthy denouements.

He used NFL players as examples. Short careers, usually over by age 30. And yes, it is not clear how many Seattle Seahawks will experience a greater moment than they just did, in defeating Denver 43-8. Not many.

Pete Carroll, however, has just reached a peak at age 62. His previous peak, at least in terms of his career, came at age 52, after the 2003 football season, when his USC Trojans won a national championship. Though we could make a case that he edged slightly higher up that peak when USC was undefeated the following year and won an undisputed national title, when he was 53.

If Pete is your typical coach, and winning at the highest possible level is the greatest achievement, the first 61 year of his life were simply preamble for his zenith, tonight. And knowing what I do of Pete, he probably believes in his bones that he will come back and do this again.

I do worry about about that Gatorade dousing, both of them, late in the game. I have seen photos of Pete receiving the Lombardi Trophy, while still on the field, and appearing to be less than comfortable, still wearing the clothes he was doused in, while temperatures were 40 or lower.

I have written in the past about the perils of dousing with liquid a not-young coach. And the following is from an item I posted in 2011:

A story that has grown up around Long Beach State football, and now accepted as fact (true or not) … In 1990, George Allen (yes, that George Allen, the NFL Hall of Famer, former Rams and Redskins coach) had taken over the LBSU program. The 49ers started 0-5 but finished 6-0, and it looked as if Allen were in the process of turning around the program.

His team celebrated their 6-5 finish by dumping a bucket of water/Gatorade/sports drink on him, which was probably not a good idea — he was 72, and the temperatures were in the 50s — and he caught pneumonia and died of a heart attack a month later.

The program was killed after one more season. It has been accepted wisdom in Long Beach, ever since, that had Allen lived the program would have survived several more years, at the least. (San Jose State still plays football; why not Long Beach?)

And, finally, I must admit I was badly wrong, in 2009, when I flatly predicted, as Pete Carroll left USC, that he would never experience the same success he did at Troy.

He took it up another level. He might do it again. And more power to him.