Brady rallies Patriots

JOSEPH ADDAI had just run through the New England Patriots’ team picture, the RCA Dome was delirious and the Indianapolis Colts had both momentum and the lead.

At half-time New England trudged to its locker room, and soon enough there was Tom Brady in the middle of it, demanding everyone’s attention, commanding everyone’s respect. The Patriots’ season had been a joy ride for eight weeks, so this hadn’t been needed, the team leader leading after the team had been punched in the mouth.

But this was what the old guys expected and the new guys had been seeking. There was Brady, giving a short, forceful speech, reminding everyone of the slogan of the week against these Colts.

“It’s a 60-minute game,” Brady said, eyes darting around the locker room. “We’ve got to play a 60-minute game and not give up a minute early.”

No, it wasn’t Lombardi or Rockne, but it was enough. This is Tom Brady, the new Joe Cool, and as long as he’s standing there, his teammates never doubt what’s possible.

In what was hyped as the biggest NFL regular season game ever, the Patriots stayed on course for an unbeaten season as Brady threw two of his three touchdown passes in a four-minute span of the fourth quarter on Sunday night to overcome a 10-point deficit and beat Super Bowl champion Indianapolis, 24-20.

The win keeps the Patriots (9-0) on course for the NFL’s first unbeaten season since Miami did it 1972 and gives them the first tiebreaker over Indianapolis (7-1) in the AFC playoffs.

It was January in this same building when the Patriots led 21-6 at the half, only to watch the Colts storm back, take their only lead in the final minute and win the AFC Championship. That burned Brady all summer. And the way the Colts manhandled the Chicago Bears two weeks later left every Patriot thinking they had been 30 seconds from a Super Bowl win but let it slip.

This time New England trailed 13-7, the vaunted offence had just 114 total yards and Brady even had thrown a rare pick.

But it’s a 60-minute game, Brady kept saying, so everyone kept listening.

By the end of those 60 minutes, Brady was taking a knee, playfully head-butting his teammates in the huddle and soaking up the one-of-a-kind feeling of turning a deafening Dome silent.

“It was a battle,” he sighed after. “It took us 60 minutes.”

This was both Brady’s worst game of the season and his best. His two picks doubled his season total to four, his 255 yards were a season low and he was sacked twice. Against the vicious Colts defence, the Pats looked rattled, not record-breaking.

But for Brady, until this year at least, it had never been about the statistics. The fact that he is en route to perhaps the greatest quarterbacking season of all-time simply is a by-product of the weapons surrounding him.

For all the struggles of the first 3½ quarters, he finished the game on a torrid 8 for 11 streak good for 134 yards, two touchdowns and one huge victory.

Brady wasn’t interested in talking about the possibility of a perfect season. He wasn’t concerned about any touchdown record and he certainly didn’t think this was anything but a nice regular-season win.

“The thing is, we’re 9-0 and it doesn’t matter,” Brady said. “It just doesn’t matter. None of this matters. What matters is January.”

New England, which had been scoring more than 41 points a game, had piled points on late in several games in which they were far ahead, including last week’s 52-7 win over Washington, when they kept playing hard well into the fourth quarter.

In this contest, anticipated since the schedule came out last April, they had to work their hardest just to win against perhaps the only team in the NFL close to them.

“Some victories do mean more than others,” said linebacker Tedy Bruschi, one of a handful of Patriots who played on all three of their Super Bowl winners. “We’re going to remember this.”