Mike Vaccaro

Mike Vaccaro

NFL

We will never see another dynasty like these Patriots

FOXBOROUGH, Mass. — Take a good look. Or, if you’d prefer, take a good, angry look. For as long as this New England Patriots’ season lasts, if it ends next week in Denver or here against the Steelers, or if it goes all the way to another stop in the Big Game, in Santa Clara, stop. Pause. Look.

Because honestly?

We’re never going to see anything like this again.

Yes, yes, yes: Every time a dynasty ends its run, we tend to sing the same refrain. We’ll never see another team like the Packers again. We’ll never see another team like the Steelers again. We’ll never see another team like the Niners again. We’ll never see another team like the Cowboys again.

Time didn’t stop when Vince Lombardi stepped down, when Terry Bradshaw retired, when Joe Montana got hurt, when Jerry Jones started to outsmart himself in Dallas. Time shouldn’t stop when the end arrives for Tom Brady, or when Bill Belichick decides he wants to spend more time on his boat than staring at a projection screen.

“This is a hard place to play,” Belichick said Saturday night, maybe half an hour after the Patriots had quashed the Chiefs, 27-20, advancing to their fifth straight AFC Championship Game and 10th in the last 15 years. “We’re at over 100 practices now, and that doesn’t include walk-throughs.

“It’s definitely a grind but they come in here, this group, every day, pencils sharpened, sitting in their seats, they want to learn, want to know how to get better, want to compete, and they do that on a daily basis year after year.”

Fifty years of accumulated, enforced parity was supposed to render it impossible for the Patriots to do what they’ve been doing, what they keep doing, what it looks like they’ll be doing until and unless they finally grow bored with the grind and take up a new hobby.

If you root for the Jets you can certainly detest them, because you’ve had an up-close look at this whole run. You can remember a time when the Pats and the Jets weren’t all that different, living under similarly crossed stars, cursing similarly egregious fates. That’s fine. You’re entitled.

If you are a Giants fan you will forever have those two Super Bowls, those two forever days in Arizona and Indiana, and so you will forever have an air of superiority, no matter what the numbers say. That’s fine. You’re entitled.

And then you tune into another Patriots game on another January weekend. They oppose another team with all kinds of hopes and beliefs — it’s the Chiefs this time; it’s been the Colts in the past, and the Steelers, and the Jets, and any number of upstarts. Maybe you talk yourself into it again: This is the time. This is the year. This is the end.

Then the Patriots walk onto the field and treat the Chiefs — who had only won 11 games in a row heading into this one — like Pop Warner all-stars. This is 15 years they’ve been doing this now. Lombardi’s Packers, they didn’t even have a 10-year run. The Montana 49ers, their shelf life was 1981 through 1990. That was a hell of a decade.

The Pats are on their way to a second dominant decade. With no sign of weakening.

“I think we can do a lot better,” Brady said, which is a terrifying thing for the rest of the league to ponder.

Years in football are like dog years multiplied by 10. Yet here they are, 15 years and counting, in another AFC Championship Game and a few steps away from another Super Bowl — which would be their seventh — and a few more from another title, which would be their fifth.

With no sign — with no trace, with no hint — of let-up.

“It’s pretty cool,” Brady said. “It’s hard to do. You’ve got to grind throughout the whole year, and there’s only four teams playing next weekend. And we’re one of them.”

The people in the stands stood the whole way, and they sang their songs, and they basked in this magnificent, surpassing era. You may hate all of that. You may hate the Patriots. But take a good, hard look around the next few weeks. You won’t see their like again. Not anytime soon.