FOXBOROUGH -- Larry Izzo recognized the dead man's face. He didn't want it to be so.
It didn't seem possible. He'd just been joking with the guy a few days earlier, showing him a diamond-encrusted Super Bowl ring as they regaled each other with stories from two fields of combat.
One a football field. The other a killing field. Larry Izzo understands the difference now; that reality hit when Larry Izzo realized David Connolly was dead.
Connolly, a Suffolk County assistant district attorney, was killed April 6 when his CH-47 Chinook helicopter crashed in bad weather about 80 miles south of Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan.
Izzo, the Patriots' Pro Bowl special teamer, had visited American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan in late March on a goodwill trip sponsored by the NFL. And the reality of war was driven home only a few days after his return during a visit to the Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington, where he and his teammates stopped before continuing on to the White House to celebrate another Super Bowl victory with President Bush.
Those experiences left him changed.
So changed that Izzo has a new goal, beyond the annual one of returning to the Super Bowl. It has nothing to do with rings and victories and everything to do with doing what he can for men in combat and the families that too often are left to mourn them.
''It's the real deal," Izzo said. ''It's life and death. You mess up on the football field and you might lose a game. Out there, you mess up and lives are lost. We need to remember those guys."
One he particularly remembered was Connolly. When he got home to Boston and heard about an Army reservist, an attorney, missing in Afghanistan, he told Patriots public relations director Stacey James, ''I think I met that guy." When the Globe ran Connolly's picture the next day, Izzo's outlook on life changed again.
''When I saw the story about an attorney who died in Afghanistan, I got a bad feeling," Izzo recalled. ''I met David at Bagram just a couple of days before his helicopter crashed. We had about a 15-minute conversation at dinner one night at his base. We talked about Boston. He was a real sports fan. It was his second tour overseas. He'd already been to Iraq and then he got called up again to go to Afghanistan. That impressed me so much. He was such a likable guy.
''A week later, the day we left Baghdad, his helicopter crashed. I didn't know anything about it until I got home. It was so incredible."
So, too, was the day he walked through Walter Reed Hospital, less than a week after he'd returned from the war zone, and heard a patient say, ''I'm the guy who put your ring in my pocket in Afghanistan."