It's been a couple of weeks now, and I'm still not sure it's safe to bring up the subject of the New England Patriots and Super Bowl 42.
By now, we all know what happened so I won't bother rehashing it. Suffice it to say it was one of the most shocking moments in Super Bowl history that didn't involve a "wardrobe malfunction." What I've found even more shocking, however, is the reaction that's been generated by what was, let's face it, nothing more than the latest in a long line of disappointments involving Boston-area sports teams.
About a month into the NFL season, I used this space to question whether New England sports fans were ready to deal with the prospect of having a transcendent, history-making franchise in our own backyard. How would we react to having a team capable of the kind of run we saw the Patriots go on this year?
We got our answer in the pathetic way this region—and its media—responded to the end of one of the greatest single seasons in professional football history.
I understand the emotional reaction. What I couldn't understand, or stomach, quite frankly, was what we saw from the supposed "experts" in the Boston sports media. These same honks who just hours before were ready to crown the Patriots the "greatest franchise of all time" couldn't wait to bury them, in some cases minutes after Eli Manning hit Plaxico Burress with the game-winning pass.
I would expect that type of reaction from the knuckle-draggers who call sports talk radio, but I expected a little more from the guys who make pretty good jack punching up those calls. And while I'll give many of those guys credit for at least grudgingly acknowledging the Giants' tremendous performance, that didn't stop these frontrunners from, almost in the same breath, dismissing the Pats' record-breaking 18-0 season as "meaningless" just because they didn't win the Super Bowl.
Are you kidding me? Are we really so addled as a tribe that we are actually going to toss aside an entire season because we lost one game? Those guys gave us 18 weeks of invincibility, and, in the process, made their fans believe—not hope, but believe—that every time their team took the field, they were going to win.
How many times have New England sports fans been able to enjoy that feeling? How about never—until the 2007-08 Patriots came on the scene.
I also took away from the Super Bowl a renewed understanding about how quickly fortunes can change in sports. That's one of the things I've always loved about athletic competition—on any given day, a weaker team can go out and beat a better one, and that one or two plays can be the difference between hoisting a trophy and puking your guts out.
I'm not talking about the winning touchdown, by the way, but the three or four other chances the Pats had to end that game by either sacking Manning or intercepting one of those dying quails he threw up that were masquerading as passes.
And, as big a Patriots fan as I am, the romantic in me loved seeing the Giants stick it back in the faces of all of the people who gave them absolutely no chance to win. You simply can't disrespect a team like that, especially one that managed to take out the Packers and the Cowboys in consecutive weeks. They deserved to win that game because they were the better team that night, even though I refuse to believe they are better, top to bottom, than the Patriots, at least this year.
There will be a lot of questions to be answered in Foxboro before the upcoming training camp, too many to list here. But that's next year. Right now, the Red Sox are in Florida, and I'm sure a lot of sports fans are hoping the impending defense of the World Series championship will serve as an athletic sorbet that will cleanse from the palate one of the most disappointing ends to a football season ever.
I look forward to the return of the Sox, but mainly because I want to forget about the Patriots. After all, this team made history, and they made it long before their plane ever touched down in Glendale, Arizona.
