love it when we can say, “You read it here first.”

You read it here first.

Our own Ev “Ace” Parker, via the magic eight-ball that he bought for his grandsons at the local WalMart a few years back, has now correctly predicted the winner of the Super Bowl eight years in a row — including Sunday’s improbable win for his beloved Giants over the vaunted Patriots.

Ace called his shot in Saturday’s paper, and Super Bowl MVP Eli Manning and company took care of business a day later.

Speaking of Eli — writing of Eli? — I have to say I’m pretty happy for him.

I’ve always wondered in the back of my mind about siblings in sports, and more specifically how they handle it when one brother is superior to the other one — like Eli and big bro Peyton of the Colts.

You can probably come up with a combo on your own, but I always think of guys like Tony and Chris Gwynn, Cal and Billy Ripken, Hank and Tommie Aaron, Babe and Joe Ruth — just kidding on that one — Mark and Brent Price, Matt and Tim Hasselbeck, etc., where one guy’s career really stands apart from his brother’s.

Not that there really was that big a gap between the Mannings like there is with the Ripkens.

But still, the general consensus was that Eli was never going to get out of Peyton’s shadow, especially after the older Manning won the same Super Bowl MVP award last year by beating the Bears.

Being a Manning, being a No. 1 pick in the draft and playing in New York all added up that nothing Eli did was probably ever going to be good enough.

Except winning the Super Bowl.

Watching the game, I couldn’t help but think of my own brother, four years younger, who has grown up to be a successful banker in Sacramento with his first baby on the way next month.

You see, I was pretty hard on him as a kid, especially when we played basketball.

It was my thing first, something I became pretty good at, and I have a feeling he started playing because my friends and I were so into it.

He and I would play one-on-one in our driveway, and the final scores those first few years were always like 97-4.

That’s because we’d say we were going to play to 100, but he would always get upset that he was losing so badly and go in and tell on me.

My dad would come out and yell at me, and my response always was that I was letting him shoot, he was just missing.

For what it’s worth, it’s true to this day, but would it have killed me to miss a few of my shots on purpose?

Probably not. Chalk it up to things you know when you’re 32 that you didn’t know when you were 12, I guess.

Then, invariably, he’d want to play again the next day, and I’d tell him no because I didn’t want to get — cue up Wally and Beaver Cleaver here — the “business” from Dad when I womped him again.

No, no, he would insist, we’ll play all the way to 100.

And then the chicken-or-the-egg game began again.

But he always came back for more. Even when he was like 11 or 12 — and my friends and I were 15 or 16 — he would always scrap through our legendary Friday night games in the lighted driveway on Grendel Way.

For the first couple of years, he was pretty much the second-worst player behind our main man Justin — who was oddly proud of that — or third-worst if Alvin showed up.

We weren’t ever specifically rough on my brother, just rough with each other, but he took it. And took it. And took it.

And he kept coming back.

And eventually he became better than all of us, and I’m definitely not trying to take credit for that — it was more like in spite of us, in the sense that he loved playing basketball so much that he was willing to put up with all the other guff.

Like Eli proved Sunday and my brother proved a long time ago, Cain is able.