Then there are those stories that are just too good not to be true.

This is one of those stories.

One of the most famous plays in the history of football came on Nov. 8, 1970 when the New Orleans Saints' Tom Dempsey kicked a 63-yard field goal to beat the Detroit Lions, 19-17. No one in the National Football League has ever kicked a longer field goal.

That's a pretty good story right there, but — trust me — it gets better.

Dempsey was born with half of a right foot and no right hand. You don't see many professional football players — even kickers — who have those kinds of handicaps. For Dempsey to overcome what he did to make the NFL record book is some kind of story.

But I'm here to tell you this story gets even better.

Unlike today's 'soccer style' kickers, who approach the ball from the side and hit it with their instep, Dempsey kicked the ball head-on.

Dempsey was fitted with a special shoe, and even in the farthest reaches of Tulane Stadium, fans could see that he had only half of his right foot.

As you might imagine, Dempsey's historic kick — even though it was for a team that had won only one previous game that season — was big news for the local newspaper — The New Orleans Times-Picayune.

Here's where the story really gets good.

In addition to coverage about Dempsey on the front of its Sports section, the newspaper cleared out two facing pages on which it showed a sequence tracing the flight of the ball as it headed toward the goal post.

Back in those days, before all this computer technology, it was the custom of many newspapers to have someone apply an India ink-like substance to some images in order to hide specks of light and other things that might detract from the photo.

As it turns out, the rather aged fellow who performed this function at the Times-Picayune was very knowledgeable about photography, but he knew zilch about football.

When he saw the image of Tom Dempsey approaching the ball, the guy figured that somehow the photo had been blurred to the extent that the kicker's foot had been obscured.

Sooooooooooo ...

Yup, you guessed it. The old guy drew in a whole foot for Tom Dempsey, and that's how the photo appeared in thousands and thousands of newspapers the next day.

I don't know what the reaction of the readers was — perhaps they thought Dempsey had visited Lourdes in the days before the game. But what ensued in the Times-Picayune newsroom after the initial consternation has been decades of hilarity.

I suppose that every time a new president of the United States takes office, one of the first things he does is ask whether all those UFO stories about Roswell, N.M., and 'Area 51' in Nevada are true.

When I became sports editor of The Times-Picayune in 1986, one of the first things I did was check into the famous 'Tom Dempsey growing a whole foot' story.

And folks ... it's true. Every word. They respect history in New Orleans, and I actually got to see the altered photo with the dried ink elongating the kicker's foot.

Of course, what got me to thinking about the whole Tom Dempsey thing was what happened with Katie Couric this week.

The New York City tabloids had a field day with a picture of the new 'CBS Evening News' anchor.

Through the magic of Photoshop, a computer editing software, Couric 'lost' about 20 pounds when a photo of her that had been distributed to the media was altered for publication in a 400,000 circulation CBS quarterly called 'Watch!'

The publication is a product of the CBS press department and goes out to various employees, members of the media, gift shops and theme parks.

To put it kindly, Couric does not look her best in the original photo. In the altered version, she's just stunning. Her figure is slimmer; her face and hair are brighter; even her pearls are better-looking.

That kind of thing goes against all kinds of journalistic ethics. Of course, so did all that photo altering back in the '60s and '70s.

Couric is a wildly popular morning news personality who will be striving for all the credibility she can muster as the first woman to be sole anchor on a network evening news show.

She apparently had nothing to do with the photographic legerdemain, and joked about preferring the original photo.

'There's more,' she said, 'of me to love.'

This current technology is getting just a little scary. In minutes, a 12-year-old could Photoshop an image so that you would swear Katie Couric was holding the football when Tom Dempsey kicked that 63-yard field goal.

But that, friends, would be a story far too good to be true.

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Sam Pollak is editor of The Daily Star. He can be reached at spollak@thedailystar.com or at (607) 432-1000, ext. 208.