Get ready for two solid weeks of hate from the rest of America.
The New England Patriots are headed to the Super Bowl after dominating the Pittsburgh Steelers in the AFC championship game. Bill Belichick and Tom Brady will try to be the first coach/quarterback combo to ever win five Super Bowls.
It’ll be the seventh trip to the championship game for the Pats in the Belichick/Brady Era, a run of unprecedented success that has made the Patriots the envy of the football world.
Seven trips to the Super Bowl in 16 seasons. Incredible. That’s more than twice as many as any other team in the NFL, a league that taught us how parity is an integral part of the biggest pro sports league in America.
In this day and age it’s supposed to be impossible to build a dynasty. That’s held true in the NFC, where the Atlanta Falcons will be the 12th team from that conference to play in Super Sunday since 2002, when the Patriots shocked the Rams in Super Bowl XXXVI.
Meantime, the Pats have ruled the AFC. They’ve been to six straight conference championships, and have been to nearly half of the Super Bowls played since Brady became a starter.
This season has been dubbed the Revenge Tour, with Brady leading a team hell-bent on exacting retribution for a the four games Brady missed because of a dubious Deflategate suspension. He did his time, the Pats won three of four games without him, and now he is coming off Sunday’s 384-yard performance, a New England postseason franchise record.
Once again, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell was nowhere to be seen in Foxborough. Somehow, Goodell chose Atlanta as the place to spend his championship Sunday – returning to the Georgia Dome a week after watching the Falcons beat the Seahawks there.
It’s going to be tough for the NFL to explain why Goodell is back in Atlanta on Super Bowl Sunday.
Sunday’s sell-out crowd of 66,829 can tell Goodell what he hasn’t seen in person for two years now. Brady sees the field like no other quarterback in the game. He threw completions to seven receivers in the first half alone. He executed a perfect flea-flicker and delivered the ball to a waiting Chris Hogan.
He continued his growing legacy as the greatest to ever play the game.
We’ve often pointed out that Brady’s final drive against the Rams in 2002 ushered in an incredible run of success for Boston’s teams. This Super Bowl will mark the 14th time in 16 years that a New England team is playing for the championship in one of the four major pro leagues.
The NFL sits on top of that group as the most popular league in America. And the Patriots sit on top of the NFL. Again.
Which is why everyone else in the country hates us. They’ll point to Spygate and Deflategate and 3 a.m. fire alarms as things New England does to make it to the top.
We’ll point to a quarterback that plays the game like no one else has. A quarterback who has never been more motivated to bring “One More” championship to New England.
Tom Caron is a studio host for the Red Sox broadcast on NESN. His column appears in the Portland Press Herald on Tuesdays.
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