Here, it's the Snow Bowl. The final game at Foxboro Stadium, and unofficially the game when the Patriots' prolonged run of excellence began. Excluding certain pivotal events from October 2004, there's not a Boston sporting event in my lifetime that I remember more fondly.
The three Super Bowl championships were wonderful and fulfilling. But for sentimental purposes, for warm memories on a cold day, nothing trumps the Snow Bowl. We'll see other Super Bowls. But we'll never again see an atmosphere and an outcome like that.
A decade later, roughly XXXVI viewings of "Three Games To Glory" later, and I still have no idea how Adam Vinatieri knuckled that tying 45-yard field goal through the snowflakes, and then, the uprights.
Yet the Snow Bowl comes to mind today not just because of the calendar's reminder. The delightful happenings on the field Sunday at Gillette Stadium were more than enough to send a Patriots fan into a spiral of nostalgia, and some certain guests of honor made it feel like good old days have never left even if the names on the jerseys have changed.
When Sterling Moore poked what would have been the winning touchdown out of Ravens receiver Lee Evans's hands on Baltimore's failed final drive, it reminded you of something Ty Law, that ol' clutch cornerback, might have pulled off against the Colts seven or eight years ago. That Law, an honorary co-captain along with Drew Bledsoe, Troy Brown and Tedy Bruschi Sunday, was at Gillette Stadium to witness the moment only added to the pleasant symmetry of what this franchise has accomplished.
While the gracious Bledsoe, who recovered from a serious injury but never recovered his job from Brady, didn't have a role in the Snow Bowl beyond looking cold and helping Brady warm up . . .
. . . it is always great to see the second-best quarterback in franchise history at Gillette. And the names Bruschi, Brown, and Law do take you back to that particular game, and the mind wanders back to all the what-ifs and how'd-he-do-that's that broke the Patriots' way.
