2004-02-03 - 1:32 a.m.

I can never, ever complain about my sports teams again. For I have had my cake and eaten in, too. I have chosen to follow a team, and they have won. What else is there in life?

What can one say about the New England Patriots? They make me honored to be a fan. They are epitome of all that is real and good in sports. They are the ultimate team.

They are a starless bunch, a collection of interchangeable parts that funchion together as a many-headed beast. They play every style of football, smash-mouth defense, hassling the enemy at every step, hurling long touchdown passes or little fades. They can shut you down 12-0 in the snow (vs. Miami), or they can come back with the last-minute touchdown pass (vs. the Texans), or they can halt a furious 21-point Peyton Manning comeback at the goal-line, four straight times, as time expires. The coaching staff will come up with the plan they need, and every man on the field will know what the other is thinking, because they believe in each other. That�s what team is: they trust each other, believe each other, love each other. They are Mike Vrabels and Tedy Bruschis, blue-collar guys who just want to be respected, to be part of something, but most of all, to win.

Yes, there is Tom Brady, but Tom Brady is a new breed of superhero. Tom Brady is a brand, an ideal. He is the boy next door who suddenly discovered supernatural powers. Two years ago he was an anonymous sixth-round pick, a backup being thrown in to play mopup when the big man went down. Today he is a two-time Super Bowl MVP, one of four all-time and the youngest ever, the new Joe Montana. Yet he never stopped aw-shucksing his way through interviews, as he slowly grasps the magnitude of what he has accomplished.

�Girls want to be with him. Guys want to be him,� one teammate said. Yes, we all want to be Tom Brady; we hope, in our finer moments, to live up to his standards. To grab life by the reins, to take your one opportunity and run with it.

Brady was handed the reins of a 1-3 team two years ago when Drew Bledsoe, the most prolific passer in Patriot history, was toppled with a nasty injury. The team jelled around Brady, he took them to 5-5, and they never lost another game. It was a year of seized opportunity and amazing luck. And then came the dark turn, or the moment of destiny. Battling the Raiders in the snow, things looked bleak, Raiders up 16-13, time winding down in the playoffs, and Tom Brady drops back to pass�

I am at Goose Island Brewery, watching the game with Mark and Jen, his long-distance girlfriend. My brother Mark has just moved out from Boston, and we are choosing to embrace our New England roots. We are rusty at this whole brotherhood thing; we went off to college and became different people. But we remember our childhood, when we lived in Massachusetts and tromped in the snow, when our father would watch the game as we sat by the woodburning stove with a game of our own. Those children are still in there somewhere. Perhaps this moment of shared history, this reminder of our very New England-ness, this surprising scrappy underdog team, can draw us together.

...and the black uniform of an Oakland Raider comes flying in. The ball comes loose, and Raiders recover, and they will run out the clock and eliminate the Patriots from the playoffs. Perhaps Drew Bledsoe will be back next year instead of Tom Brady�

And yet, and yet� the hand of fate intervenes, an angel referee from above invokes the holy writ of the rulebook, and rules it a tuck, an incomplete pass, not a fumble after all, and new life is breathed into Tom Brady and the Patriots. And he will not let this gift, this life, pass him up again. He drives them down the field in the final minutes, and his right-hand man, Mr. Automatic, Adam Vinatieri, kicks a 40-yarder through the snow and through the uprights, the most clutch kick in playoff history. What happens next is merely a formality, as the boy wonder leads the team down the field once again and Vinatieri finishes it with another bullet. Back at Goose Island Brewery, we hooted and hollered, then went off to the Pick-Me-Up Caf� with a spring in our steps.

The Patriots were the luckiest dogs on earth. But to beat Pittsburgh they would need the help of their old leader, Drew Bledsoe, who had gone down with a major injury, blood everywhere, and when he was healed, he found his job had disappeared. He was left on the sidelines to watch this boy wonder take the team, his team, to the Super Bowl and take his job away from him. And all he could do was keep his head down and say nothing.

But finally with his team on the ropes in Pittsburgh, the heavy underdog Patriots holding a tenuous grasp on the game, Brady was taken out by a nasty tackle, and Bledsoe was called on, one last time, to help out his old team, and he lofted a touchdown pass that made the difference. The Patriots were going to the Super Bowl. After the game, he cried.

It was all to come to an end, though, as the Saint Louis Rams, the second-biggest favorite in the history of the game, behind the superheroics of Kurt Warner and Marshall Faulk, would roll over the puny Patriots, a 24-year-old kid from Michigan and a band of nobodies. Excapt that the team came together, and harrassed and harried the Rams, and somehow found themselves leading 17-3 in the third quarter. But then Warner suddenly found his groove, and Brady couldn�t get anywhere, and suddenly is was all tied up, 17-17 with 1:40 left and 80 years from the end zone. Sit on it, advised John Madden. Don�t go for it. But that was not in Tom Brady�s nature. He went for it with a little pass here and there to a nobody named J.R. Redmond, and a big pass to Troy Brown. Suddenly there were four seconds left and there was Adam Vinatieri, setting up for the 48-yard field goal, and of course it went through, and the band of nobodies had vanquished the mighty giants, and the greatest fairytale plot of sports had been completed like none had before, the second-biggest underdogs in Super Bowl history wins the first Super Bowl ever to be won on the last play of the game. Tom Brady walked home with his trophy and a smile on his face. He had taken his opportunity and he had never given it back.

Perhaps there will never be a script so great as that first Super Bowl season, but the sequel has given it a run for its money. There was a dark moment in there in 2002, in a 9-7 season in which the Patriots missed the playoffs on the third tiebraker (despite a spectacular come-from-behind final victory in Miami). Perhaps it was an �Empire Strikes Back� moment for our young Skywalker. But by the next season, he is trained, he has become a master, he will vanquish the demons, the doubters, once and for all.

Things start bleak in the first week, an old captain released before the opener, and his new team, the Buffalo Bills, throttle the Patriots, 31-0, and Brady goes nowhere. There are injuries galore, but somehow the team jells once again, and at 2-2 they take off. They win the next 15 in a row, beating co-MVPs Steve McNair and Peyton Manning. Shutting out the opposition three times. Going two months without allowing a touchdown at home. Throttling the Buffalo Bills by a score of, what do you know, 31-0 in the season finale.

This was a team that simply would not be denied. They won in the cold, the fourth-coldest game in NFL history, against the Titans, when a last-second heave by the bionic man McNair (he�ll play with fractured limbs, whatever) bobbles out of the hands of its receiver. But what awaited was an even greater test: Peyton Manning, who had just completed the greatest two-game stretch of any quarterback in history, with a near-perfect rating, eight touchdowns and no interceptions. No problem; the Patriots hassled Manning into one of his worst performances, four interceptions, a dismal QB rating, anda trip home while the non-MVP, little aw-shucks Tom Brady, was making his second Super Bowl.

The script was not preordained, but the result was. It was the wildest Super Bowl of all time: the lowest-scoring Super Bowl ever in the beginning, the highest-scoring Super Bowl ever at the end. Running, stuffing, and punting came early, as the Patriots needed two rushes, measuring sticks, and an instant replay to pick up six inches. But finally the Patriots struck first blood, a touchdown catch by Deion Branch with three minutes left in the half.

As if woken from a slumber, out comes the quarterback, this little Cajun guy named Jake (who by the way is just as Aw-shucks as Tom Brady, on a team that�s just as anonymous as New England) just emerging from a 1-for-9 slump, starts chucking 23- and 39-yard passes, and Brady steps it up, and there�s a flurry of scoring, and by the time the dust clears it�s 14-10 Patriots at the half.

Suddenly both the �vaunted� defenses have been undressed, and by kickoff so had a woman (yes, Janet Jackson) and a man (a streaker who disguised himself as a referee and stripped at midfield). But as they return to the field they return to their old ways, getting nowhere fast; the matchup is maddeningly even. And so it comes down in the fourth quarter to the superheroes, the Everyman Supermen, Jake Delhomme, lofting over-the-shoulder lobs to a racing receiver, and Tom Brady, spreading out the field and throwing play-action passes right on the money. Delhomme throwing the longest touchdown pass in Super Bowl history, an 85-yarder, and Brady throwing the most completions in Super Bowl history, 32.

But in the end the script was the same: there were the challengers, furiously tying up the game with a minute to play. And there was Tom Brady, marching out the field to lead his troops into battle for one last drive. And there was his right-hand man Adam Vinatieri, calmly lining up to kick another game-winner through the uprights, and chalk another victory up to the New England Patriots.

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