I had some Stanford chums over to watch the Super Bowl and enjoy some snacks yesterday. Having spent 2 years in Boston and having been there when the underdog Pats upset the juggernaut Rams to win their first NFL championship, i have a bit of a soft spot for Tom Brady and co., and hoped to see them pull off the first ever 19-0 season. I wrote a few weeks ago that i had enjoyed seeing the Pats develop a cocky attitude after their "Spygate" incident, morphing into an unstoppable and merciless opponent out to destroy the rest of the league. While this cast them as the villains of the 2007 season, i thought it was great.

The Pats entered the game a 12 point favorite in Vegas, despite Tom Brady's much-investigated ankle injury. Most pundits picked them to win handily, and nearly all except a few staunch anti-New England columnists picked them to win. I however, began having bad feelings the night before ... i can't remember being so worked up over a Super Bowl. I kept telling myself that Brady's ankle was ridiculously over-analyzed and wouldn't be a factor, that the Giants were due for a return to reality, that Eli Manning would fold in front of the Pats' secondary. But i couldn't shake the negative omens.

And my gut turned out to be correct ... in many ways the Pats returned to the 2002 Super Bowl when they defeated the much-ballyhooed Rams, only now they played the St. Louis role. Just as then, the underdogs came in with the perfect defensive strategy to keep their opponents' vaunted offense off-balance. Just as then, the underdogs' offense bent but didn't break, and came up with one last drive to win the game. Just as then, the genius coach and his arrogant ways got their comeuppance. Only now it was the Patriots being humbled.

About halfway through the fourth quarter (when the Giants were up 10-7) i began to think that the New Yorkers deserved to win. Their defense was outstanding, and Eli had come up with some impressive plays. But beyond praising the Giants, i was really thinking that if this is the Patriots final effort to go 19-0, then they don't deserve it. It looked as if Brady and co. had drunk their own Kool-Aid. You could bandy around a lot of excuses here. Perhaps his ankle really wasn't well ... he certainly was way off on his deep throws. But for a team that had been placed among the greatest ever, this was far from an all-time performance. What struck me most was how badly Belichick got outcoached. This is a guy that is supposed to eat, sleep, and dream football. Who supposedly sleeps in his office and works 20 hour days to prepare for games. The master of game planning and adjustments. And quite frankly, his team looked awful. I expected the Patriots to come out in the second half having adjusted their offensive blocking to keep the pressure off Brady. Nope. I scratched my head why Belichick went for a first down on 4th and 13 instead of kicking a 49 yard field goal, especially when his offense had yet to gain 13 yards on a play. I wondered how Belichick, known for his imposing defenses, fielded one that put little to no pressure on Eli Manning and whose secondary played worse than when he was having receiver Troy Brown fill in at cornerback.

The Giants fans' chant after the game is the perfect epitaph to the Patriots' season: 18 and 1. A perfect season made meaningless because they failed to win their final game. A while back i wrote that Brady was showing that he could pile up stats just like Peyton Manning. Now he has found that, just as Peyton learned, those stats are poor comfort if you don't bring home the trophies.

Are there no more heroes in sports? Are we down to varying degrees of villains? I suppose you could cast the Giants as heroes, but really this game feels more like a Pats loss than a Giants win. The 49ers of the 80's were good guys. Despite the fact that for no good reason, i detested them at the time. The Patriots of 2001-2002 were a feel-good story. Although now with the proliferation of Spygate, apparently even that triumph is under suspicion of cheating. I waited for years for Chelsea to stand atop the Premier League, and when it happened i was too busy obsessing over why everyone suddenly hated us. I find these days i take much more pleasure from watching a soccer match or a football game between two teams that i don't care about than one where i'm pulling for one side. I never was one to revel in competition ... especially when the results don't go the way i want ... maybe that side of my personality is taking over. What was so bad about communism?