MIAMI — What is most remarkable about Miami steadfastly and beyond debate being a Football Town is that our two goliaths, the Dolphins and Hurricanes, have spent so much of the past quarter century not earning the title but seemingly trying to give it away.

Yet, as the most cherished season returns with the onset of training camps, no other sport can touch football in the South Florida sports market. The mightiest challengers have tried and failed.

The great LeBron James came to make the Heat king, but only briefly borrowed the crown. The even greater Lionel Messi has made soccer and a young Inter Miami franchise matter like never before here ... but not like football. The Florida Panthers have won back-to-back Stanley Cups but cannot compete with the breadth and depth of history that embeds one sport deepest in our heart and soul.

So the Dolphins open their training camp this coming Tuesday and the Canes unfurl their preseason work a week later as two massive fan bases ache with hunger that one or both might do what neither has in a generation: Make Miami Great Again.

It was Dec. 30, 2000, when the Dolphins last won a playoff game. It was one season after, on Jan. 3, 2002, when UM won its most recent of five national championships. Babies born when these teams truly mattered nationally are young adults now, still waiting, and waiting.

The Fins’ playoff-victory drought is the longest in the entire NFL. The Canes have lost six straight bowl games and 12 of the past 13. Coaches Mike McDaniel and Mario Cristobal enter their fourth seasons trying to make their teams what they used to be, to revive something missing and create at least a semblance of new glory days.

UM seems closer. The Hurricanes before the usual bowl loss were 10-2 last season, and I thought deserved their first ever invitation to the College Football Playoff, but were passed over. Quarterback Cam Ward set school records and led an exciting season, and momentum seems to have carried over as new one-year transfer rental-QB Carson Beck takes over.

The expanded 12-team CFP — a chance at a national title — is the new barometer of success for schools like Miami with a championship pedigree that demands a standard that high. UM’s championships odds entering this season (via DraftKings) are tied for 11th best. A playoff spot is expected, demanded by a fan base rightly spoiled and feeling entitled by success, however distant. That Miami and Hard Rock Stadium will host the next CFP championship game adds only another ton of incentive.

The Canes' season opens with fireworks and bombast Aug. 31 at home in prime time against glory-days rival Notre Dame, a mighty test out the gate for UM. The Fins open more quietly Sept. 7 at Indianapolis.

The two teams share a home stadium, and a hunger to live up to the past.

The Dolphins are in a less optimism-friendly spot than UM, coming off an 8-9 season and with that playoff-win drought still an embarrassing, throbbing pain. Miami’s odds to win the Super Bowl are tied for 22nd, bottom third. Buffalo and league MVP Josh Allen remain a major division impediment, and even a rallying New England has better odds in the AFC East.

The perception that the Fins’ brief contender window is closing is one that quarterback Tua Tagovailoa must take it upon himself to disprove. The jobs of McDaniel and general manager Chris Grier figure to depend on that. Owner Stephen Ross at 85 should officially lead the league in impatience.

Our collective obsession with the Dolphins and Canes — what makes this a Football Town — is worth exploring.

Its starts (but doesn’t end) with history and longevity. Before South Florida had any sort of professional team Canes football began officially in 1936, although the school fielded its first freshman squad in 1926. I doubt there is anyone alive in Greater Miami who did not grow up with UM football a part of their lives.

The Dolphins came along in 1966 as an AFL expansion team promoted to the NFL with the 1970 merger. That was decades before the Heat and even longer until the Marlins and Panthers.

Plainly put, if you grew up a sports fan in South Florida, the Dolphins and/or Canes were your first love.

But it’s more than that. More than being first.

Our lifelong love of the Dolphins and Canes took root and grew because they both were the best, once. Both teams put Miami on the national sports map, made us matter like never before, or seldom since.

Don Shula arrived and won back-to-back Super Bowls in 1972 and ‘73, the first one the only Perfect Season, still, in NFL history.

If South Florida has a singular family heirloom in sports, it is the one embossed “17-0.”

More than 50 years later, it matters still, even as a dwindling number of us remember that season firsthand while a growing number dream of an echo, of another Dolphins Super Bowl, the first since 1984.

Sports Illustrated’s cover of its 1984 college and pro football preview issue pictured Dolphins second-year QB Dan Marino and Hurricanes star Bernie Kosar, both with a youthful shock of dark curly hair. The headline: “A Pair Of Aces.”

UM had just won its first national championship in ‘83 led by Kosar, and Marino’s fabulous rookie season cast the Dolphins as the NFL’s new “it” team in the pros. The nexus of those two quarterbacks and two teams made for halcyon days.

The Hurricanes would follow with other national titles in 1987, ‘89, ‘91 and 2001. Marino would never reach another Super Bowl after that one he lost in ‘84 — and never wear the consolation ring he got.

Both teams, and as much both fan bases, have spent the past quarter century waiting for new glory days by the unforgiving standard the past has set for each.

So football is almost back, although, around here, does it ever really leave?

The Dolphins and Hurricanes will take the field again soon, and there will the usual rush of memories and wistfulness, but mostly irrational hope.

There will be all of the emotions you can’t help but feel in a first love.

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