Happy Playoff Victory Monday, everyone!
It’s been a while since we got one of these; I imagine you’re all as sore as I am. The last time the Patriots played an LA-based team in a low-scoring, defensive battle that broke open when a QB not playing his best football found his rhythm at the right time and hit a tight end up the seam to break the game open just before a massive defensive play sealed it, we were all still putting a 1 in the tens column of our dates. But after an unfathomable six-year playoff win drought, the Patriots took care of business against the Chargers and will be advancing to the AFC Divisional Round to host whoever wins tonight’s game between the Steelers and Texans.
- There are a lot of benefits of the Sunday night game on Wild Card Weekend. You get all day Saturday and all day Sunday to get things done or see who you need to see or whatever it is that mentally stable people do on weekends during football season. You come into the game with a much more solid sense of who your opponent will be if your team wins. And the Sunday Night Wild Card game has a certain feel to it that you just don’t get with the afternoon slate, which made Patriots vs. Chargers all that much more exciting.
- The flip side of that, of course, is that I’m on absolutely zero sleep right now. And I mean zero. I was up until midnight watching highlights and postgame analysis, then when I finally went to bed I was way too jacked up to sleep. So I lay there until about 2:30 before finally starting to doze off, but then there was a fire or an accident or something near me, so it was siren central for another 45 minutes. I tried for another hour to go to sleep after that before finally giving up and getting my day started at around 4:15. I hope you’ll excuse the number of typos, grammatical errors, and complete nonsense that follows—my Fan Notes are always so cleanly edited and make perfect sense, don’t they—but you all have no choice but to subject yourselves to the insane ramblings of a mentally unstable drunkard running on three double espressos and a lingering playoff buzz.
- What’s odd is that I wasn’t all that nervous for this game. If this was a Brady-era Patriots game and it was one of those squads that had those absurd win-the-Superbowl-or-your-entire-season-is-a-failure expectations, I would have spent this entire weekend a complete nervous wreck. But after an absolutely insane slate of games with comebacks and late finishes galore, I had a feeling we were due for a bit of an anomaly in the night game, and there really wasn’t ever a point where I didn’t think that the Patriots were going to win.
- And the sole reason for that confidence, pretty much from whistle to whistle, was a...
Pats Pulpit
