FOXBOROUGH - January is the month of both anticipation and reflection, named after the two-faced Roman god who looked both forward and backward. If Janus played for the Patriots, though, he'd be wearing blinkers. In Bill Belichick's myopic universe, December never happened and February is a century away.
``Everybody is 0-0 now,'' Belichick said, as soon as the regular season ended a week ago yesterday. ``We all know what it is. Lose, and you are out. Win, and you keep going. That is it.''
New England's achievements up to now are impressive and undeniable _ a franchise-record 14 victories, the last 12 in a row. A perfect home record. The best defense in club history.
The Las Vegas seers have the Patriots at 2-1 to win the Super Bowl for the second time in three years. All they have to do is get there.
Getting here was interesting, but irrelevant.
"It doesn't matter how you got here," said Belichick, whose top-seeded football team will host Denver or Tennessee in the AFC playoffs Saturday night. "Whether you won them in a row, didn't win them in a row, however it happened."
The Patriots got here by living exclusively in the moment, by ignoring previous and future Sundays, by using the players available to them, by accepting -- and adjusting to -- conditions as they found them, and by expecting to win every game by whatever means necessary.
"It's not like we're Pavlov's dogs or anything," mused linebacker Ted Johnson. "But we're conditioned to prepare a certain way."
That was how Belichick's charges smacked down Philadelphia after losing to Buffalo in the worst opening-game defeat in franchise history, how they knocked off Tennessee after losing to Washington.
That was how the Patriots smothered the Giants with nine starters missing, how they ended the Miami jinx, how they outfoxed Denver, outlasted Houston, and outpointed Indianapolis. "New England just outcoached, outpersonneled, and outplayed everybody," conceded Tom Donahoe, Buffalo's president and general manager.
Nobody was saying that after the Bills destroyed New England, 31-0, in Game 1, just days after star safety Lawyer Milloy went from teammate to opponent. The Patriots were pathetic on defense in their debut, punchless on offense. "This wasn't us today," acknowledged linebacker Mike Vrabel.
Were they distracted by the Milloy changeover? Poorly prepared? Overrated? Did they hate their coach, as ESPN commentator Tom Jackson later opined? "There is a lot of football left to be played," observed Belichick, who said on that Sunday that he wasn't looking past Monday. "It is short-term, and it is day-by-day."
Game 2 would be against a different team in a different place with a different game plan. The Eagles eventually won their division, but that day they were missing half of their secondary.
