GLENDALE, Ariz.-- --All season long, they were the bullies.
The New England Patriots were perfect even when they weren't. They beat teams when it seemed they couldn't. More often, they beat teams viciously, without mercy or concern for anyone or anything except their own legacy, their own feeling of vengeance and superiority.
The Patriots come out of the Super Bowl with a legacy, all right. They blew it like no other team had before. They're not the first NFL team to finish 18-1. No other team picked a worse time to get that one loss, however.
Thus, after they and the world were shocked by the New York Giants, 17-14, at University of Phoenix Stadium last night, they became the most humbled team in NFL history, maybe in the history of American sports. Perfect season, gone. Status as the greatest team ever, gone.
Finger flipped to all who dared question the legitimacy of their accomplishments, even while the actions of their organization raised those questions ... tucked neatly back into their palms.
It was a lot for this group - arrogant, polarizing but still excellent in every phase and scrappy until the bitter end - to swallow afterward.
"We don't point fingers around here; we win as a team and we lose as a team," said Randy Moss, minutes away from being the hero after his go-ahead touchdown catch late in the fourth quarter. "All we can really do is bounce back. It does hurt, but the good thing about it is that we can come back and bounce back from it next year.
"It'll be a long time before we can bounce back, though," he added. "That's the hard part."
They won't come back to this point. They're not showing up in Tampa a year from now 18-0. That's why they're going down in history the way they are.
What is amazing about this lone defeat is that until that final miraculous Giants drive, the Patriots had managed to rekindle memories of why they had become America's team in the first place. In the final weeks of the regular season and in the playoffs, they had done what other Patriots teams had, the ones who played as one, on which different heroes stepped up every game, on which they had confounded more talented teams and better-known players with a unique blend of toughness, resilience and smarts.
That's what they had been before they became an all-star team themselves, a tabloid favorite, a bunch that reveled in rubbing opponents' noses in it, that thought it owed that sort of nastiness to the world because the world had the nerve to poke its nose into its videotaping practices and recoil at the smell.
The Patriots were not on top of their game last night, but with 2:42 left, they were ahead 14-10, and the Giants' pre-game guarantees were about to become a trivia question. Then, the Giants evoked the spirit of those old Patriots. And Eli Manning channeled Tom Brady and his big brother, Peyton.
Oh, let's not forget a hint of Randall Cunningham. On that final drive, on third-and-five at his 44, Manning was sacked, or was as close to being sacked as a human can be, except that he wasn't. He got away, left them all grasping at his shadow, chucked one up and watched David Tyree leap and outfight the Patriots' best fighter, Rodney Harrison, for the ball, a first down at the Patriots' 24-yard line, and new life.
Manning said to get out of that jam, he "made himself small." Quite the opposite, actually.
The Giants all grew four plays later, when Plaxico Burress danced through the end zone with the ball and the winning points with 35 seconds left. He missed the shot he had called, 23-17 Giants, the score the opponents had smirked and joked about, the one Brady was befuddled about, because who could imagine holding the baddest offense in the history of the game to 17 points?
He was right on that one, at least. Not on a lot else. A good amount, more than you'd expect considering the beating he took. But he wasn't right on enough.
"This isn't something any of us prepare for," he said, "but you go into a game, and you know that some team is going to win and some team has to lose."
It just hadn't been him and his Patriots all season. There had been no reason to think last night would be different. It was different because the Patriots had uglied up what should have been a beautiful story.
They had become bullies, and the Giants had hit back harder than any of the other teams had - and the Patriots had fallen. Hard, fast and for good.
david.steele@baltsun.com
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