The Patriots have been working overtime to convince you all that this has nothing to do with four years ago. This is an opportunity to win a Super Bowl. It would be no different if they were playing the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
Bob Kraft, Bill Belichick, Tom Brady, Kevin Faulk, Wes Welker, Vince Wilfork, Matt Light, Logan Mankins, and Stephen Gostkowski were all in Arizona in 2008 and they say there’s no revenge motive.If they’d been tethered to a polygraph, the machine would have exploded.
It’s the Patriot way and it makes sense. There’s no need for the stars of 2007-08 to get into a lather about how much it means to be facing the Giants. It doesn’t give the Patriots any competitive advantage. So they deny the obvious.
Winning tonight truly won’t fix what went wrong in Glendale, where David Tyree’s helmet catch led the Giants to victory. That was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. It’s gone forever. Nothing can bring it back.
But everybody knows this game is better than your average Super Bowl because it is a rematch of the disaster in the desert.
Four years after Ellis Hobbs got spanked in the corner of the end zone, we’ve got a spectacular rematch with the same owners, the same head coaches, 22 of the same players (seven Patriots, 15 Giants), the same uniforms, the same helmet logos, and most important, the same fans.
Even without the recent history, beating the Giants is much sweeter than beating the Panthers or Texans. Conversely, losing to the Giants would hurt more than any loss to the Bucs or Bengals.
Think back to the golden days of the Larry Bird Celtics. They won three championships in the 1980s. But is there a single fan in Boston who enjoyed beating the Houston Rockets (twice) more than beating the Lakers in the 1984 Finals? No. There is not.
