Born into chaos back in the old days of the American Football League, the Pats are now seeking their sixth Super Bowl win.
They are the story that won't die, the story that seems to have more lives than a cat in shoulder pads.
For wasn't this Patriots season supposed to be their symbolic swan song, this amazing run that's been going for nearly two decades now?
Wasn't age now lining up against them, as if watching the shadows spread across the field in the late Sunday afternoon sun had all but become a metaphor for this team that was getting old right in front of us? Weren't there other teams out there with younger and better quarterbacks?
Hadn't it already started to move beyond football, this amazing Patriots story, this team that was beginning to seem as much about time and pride as if did about X's and O's?
Now?
Now, as nearly every other team has packed away the pads and cleats for the winter, these Patriots are packing for another trip to the Super Bowl — the franchise's 11th overall, ninth in the Tom Brady-Bill Belichick era and a chance to tie the vaunted Pittsburgh Steelers for the most Super Bowl wins (6) overall.
And making it all the sweeter?
Making it all the sweeter is this is the Patriots we're talking about, the Patriots who were all but born into chaos back in the old days of the American Football League, back when the glamour always was somewhere else. Back when they played in a rickety old stadium on old Route 1 in Foxboro, and the traffic jams were straight out of hell.
This was the professional football?
Sure didn't seem like it.
I remember going to a game back there in the early days, some lost year in the early '70s. The traffic was brutal. The seats were brutal. The guys behind us were brutal. All this, and the Pats were brutal, too.
It was much better on television, lying on my couch.
For has there ever been a better TV game than football? Not too many. Or it's no coincidence that the NFL exploded as a sport as soon as it got on national television in the late 1950s on Sunday afternoons. And back then there were roughly two groups of owners: the good old boys who all but had invented football, and the young guns who wanted in, and had the bankrolls to get people's attention.
Now everyone has the bankrolls to get people's attention.
And the Patriots have a back story no one would believe if they hadn't been back there in the beginning. For to tell anyone back then that one day the Patriots would become the premier franchise in the National Football League — if not all of American sports — would have been been met with howls of derision.
The Patriots?
The team that, through 1975, was 89-126-9? The team that played in that broken down old stadium in Foxboro, of all places, halfway between Boston and Providence? A team that for so long never really had a field of its own, jumping from to place like a guy trying to beat the rent? A team that too often seemed like some tribe full of football gypsies, here today, somewhere else tomorrow, all but screaming out minor league along the way.
How far have they come? A long, long way from those cold, metal bleachers of Foxboro Stadium. Under the ownership of the Kraft family, which this week celebrated 25 years of owning the team, this same franchise has won 279 regular-season contests and trophy cases full of playoff games.
To the point in the last couple of decades where the AFC Championship game has all but become the "Patriots Invitational" and that it seems surprising when the Patriots are not playing on Super Bowl Sunday. Feb. 3 will mark their third straight appearance, and fourth in the last five seasons.
That's a long way from Sunday-afternoon TV blackouts.
For to go to a Patriots game today is like being in one of the epicenters of American sport, a place where dreams come true. A place where the home team is always the favorite, never out of it and the idea of the next championship seems as close as the first-down marker.
At least for now.