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BREAKING TRADITION
Letdown let-up
BY JASON GAY

Admit it: you had the speech ready. It was an incredible year. They played over their heads. They lost to the better team.

When St. Louis’s Ricky Proehl pirouetted through the New England secondary en route to a touchdown with 81 seconds to go in Super Bowl XXXVI, you were prepared. Sure, Proehl’s score only tied the game, but you were from Boston: you’d seen enough. St. Louis would get another score, and the choke would be complete. And even though the Patriots’ journey to New Orleans was most improbable, this one was going to hurt, too.

But one of the nice things about being a Boston sports fan is that we’re so much better prepared for pain than most teams’ followers. Boston teams lose tragically, grandly — in the Red Sox’ case, epically — and their fans steel themselves for the worst. We lose on bobbled ground balls, on shortstop home runs, with too many men on the ice, on roughing the passer. We lose way better than most cities win.

So we expected a letdown in New Orleans. Even that blubbering pantload John Madden (and to think that Pat Summerall’s the one people say has passed his prime) seemed to recognize our predisposition for failure when he openly pleaded for the Patriots to take a knee and steer the game to overtime (never mind that the Rams were freely moving the ball at this point and, had they won the coin flip, would probably have wrapped up the game in 30 seconds).

And then, the Patriots did what they’d done all year long: they played like a team from somewhere else. For eons, Boston sports fans have watched in wonder at other cities’ champions as they made the clutch plays, got the lucky breaks, and pulled out last-second victories. But this season it was the Patriots who made the plays, got the breaks (Oakland, cough), and, on Sunday, they pulled off perhaps the greatest Super Bowl victory of all time. Watching them win was an out-of-body, out-of-city experience — this team couldn’t possibly have been our team.

So who are these guys? "The New England Patriots" has always been a dumb name for the team; the New England thing was naked pandering to suburbanizing regionalism. But watching the Patriots in Super Bowl XXXVI, you couldn’t help but think they really might not be Boston’s team, after all. No one thought they deserved to be there, they looked out of place, they were a little ugly, and yet, they managed to kick a little ass. Maybe they were from ... New Hampshire.

Issue Date: February 7 - 14, 2002
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