FOXBOROUGH, Mass. — When the football inexplicably veered inches to the left of the upright and the Gillette Stadium crowd erupted into delirious celebration, James Ihedigbo looked up into the stands, caught eyes with his mother and yelled: “We’re going to Indy, we’re going to the Super Bowl!”
Patriots owner Robert Kraft, who in July lost his wife of 48 years, Myra, to cancer, looked to the sky with tears in his eyes.
“Sometimes,” Kraft said later inside the jubilant Patriots locker room, “there are forces at work that are beyond anything we can understand.”
Did Myra Kraft, for whom the Patriots players have dedicated this season, have a hand in nudging that 32-yard Billy Cundiff game-tying field-goal attempt wide left with 11 seconds remaining to clinch the Patriots’ 23-20 AFC Championship win over the Ravens?
No one can ever know for sure.
What is sure, though, is there indeed were forces at work on this magical New England night, one that saw the Patriots advance to their fifth Super Bowl in the last 11 years.
And, in the most stunning development of all, the strongest force wasn’t Tom Brady and his prolific offensive weapons, a group that had carried this year to 14 wins in its 17 games entering yesterday.
“I [stunk] pretty bad today,” Brady said, “but our defense saved us.”
The Patriots defense that finished the season ranked second-to-last in the NFL outplayed the big, bad, ornery Ravens’ defense, which ranked second.
This makes the Patriots the most dangerous football team in the land right now — “because they can do it all; they can beat you any way they have to” and if you don’t think they are the favorites to go to Indianapolis and win their fourth Super Bowl since 2001 you haven’t been paying enough attention.
The Patriots showed, in the biggest game they’ve played all season, that they’re not all about Brady and the offense.
The Patriots, beating Baltimore at its own game, not only matched the Ravens’ physicality and strength, they bettered it with their own brute force.
All season, the Patriots prospered with their finesse offense, dissecting opponents with their precision passing game, with Brady picking apart opposing defenses by picking and choosing which target to throw to — uncoverable second-year tight ends Rob Gronkowski and Aaron Hernandez, slithery slot receiver Wes Welker and Deion Branch on the outside.
Their running game was a rumor and their defense was a laughing stock — in the words of Rex Ryan, unable to stop a nosebleed.
Yet, the memorable plays in this game for the Patriots didn’t come on offense; they came on defense.
The turning point of the game came when Patriots backup cornerback Sterling Moore, not even knowing the defensive play call, broke up a potential game-winning touchdown pass when he knocked the ball out of Lee Evans’ hands in the end zone with 22 seconds left.
Two plays later, Cundiff missed the field goal.
“That was the season right there,” said Patriots cornerback Kyle Arrington, whom Moore had replaced after Arrington suffered an eye injury.
After the Patriots took the 23-20 lead early in the fourth quarter, linebacker Jerod Mayo gathered the defensive players together on the sideline and said: “The final score is going to be 23-20. If they don’t score, they don’t win. We will not let them score.”
“Everybody bought into that,” Ihedigbo said.
The Patriots defense beat up the powerful Baltimore rushing attack, stifling the Ravens’ best offensive threat, running back Ray Rice, who finished with a harmless 67 rushing yards on 21 carries.
Whatever Patriots defensive tackle Vince Wilfork ate for breakfast before this game, the New England nutritionist had better make sure there’s a good stock of it in the team hotel in Indianapolis for Super Bowl week. Because Wilfork played like a man possessed last night, with a sack, three tackles for losses and several pressures
“The defense is the real MVP of this game,” Patriots right guard Brian Waters said.
“We can win games, too,” Mayo said.
“This is an unbelievable feeling, but we know there’s one more feeling out there that’s even better than this one,” Ihedigbo said. “See you in Indy.”