FOXBORO — It’s the dream.
Lifting the Lombardi trophy while the confetti falls from the sky.
Cheers, sweat and tears. Teammates, coaches and family. Hugs and hallelujahs.
It’s a scene painted every February at the end of the NFL season. A Super Bowl champion is crowned at midfield in a ceremony that every other player and coach around the league can only watch. Their dreams stay dreams, while this team, the best in the world, celebrates on a makeshift stage living out a fantasy.
Back in April, Patriots players began sharing their biggest dreams in meetings. Players, one at a time, shared their hopes from the front of the team meeting room as part of a team-building exercise. Winning a Super Bowl was the most common answer.
Six months later, after a primetime road win at Buffalo, their individual goals began to coalesce into a shared dream. With each ensuing win, a Super Bowl run felt closer and closer.
“As the season’s momentum has built, you can feel everyone just leaning into it more and more,” backup quarterback Joshua Dobbs said. “And so I know for the team, it would be amazing, right? And personally, that’s what you put your helmet on for. That’s the game you envision being part of. It would be awesome.”
For Hunter Henry, merely winning was hard enough to envision once. After making the playoffs in his first season with the Patriots in 2021, Henry and the Patriots went 8-9. Then 4-13. Then 4-13 again, as Jerod Mayo became the second Patriots coach fired in as many years.
For Henry, those struggles have painted this year’s success under Mike Vrabel in a new light.
What would making the Super Bowl mean? Well …
“It would mean everything,” he said. “When you’re at the top, you look at it a little differently when you’ve been in the valley. … So, yeah, it’d be a blessing.”
That blessing must start with beating the Broncos in this weekend’s AFC Championship Game. To do so, the Patriots must keep enough heat off Drake Maye, who has taken 10 sacks and fumbled six times in the playoffs. Denver leads the NFL with 71 sacks, thanks in large part to Pro Bowl edge rusher Nik Bonitto and All-Pro defensive lineman Zach Allen, who has a league-best 47 QB hits.
One of the strongest counters to a potent pass rush is a steady run game. Rhamondre Stevenson, for example, helped kill clock late in the Patriots’ divisional-round win over Houston, another example of the fifth-year back playing his best football late in the year. Stevenson broke several tackles versus the Texans, who couldn’t return to hounding Maye until they stopped his rushing attack.
New England Patriots quarterback Drake Maye and running back Rhamondre Stevenson celebrate a touchdown in a 38-10 win over the Dolphins at Gillette Stadium. (Nancy Lane/Boston Herald)
If Stevenson helps power the Pats back to the promised land, he admitted he’ll have realized a childhood dream. But making the Super Bowl will draw him back to his junior college days, a time that followed him receiving zero scholarship offers out of high school.
“It makes me go back to those times when I was a JUCO student, and I was with seven people in a two-bedroom house, and just knowing it paid off in a sense. That I kept going,” Stevenson said. “And to humbly say this, (it would be) a testament of who I am, and where I came from, and what I went through to get to this point.
“So making a Super Bowl would make all those things — JUCO, having no (scholarship) offers and stuff — mean a little bit more.”
The idea of making the Super Bowl also made Dobbs feel reflective. Not of being a kid or college player, but a Patriot for the first time. How between those meetings, when players revealed their hopes, hometowns, heroes and heartbreaks, they began to build toward this moment. Everyone, from Vrabel to fellow veterans like Henry down and undrafted rookies, pushing for a dream they didn’t know they would come one win away from realizing.
“I think of teammates, extra sessions and OTAs going through walkthroughs,” Dobbs said. “A guy like (wide receiver Efton Chism), right? He practiced (late in the offseason), we were learning the offense doing walkthroughs at 7 a.m. every morning to get a head start and (Chism) showed up. Then he got a touchdown in the Jets game, catches (a deep ball) in the first playoff game.
Dobbs continued: “And I think about Vrabel. Like Vrabel gave me first true opportunity to play real football in the NFL and that was off of a whim (in Tennessee). He didn’t even know me off the street for two weeks. … You just try to not take it for granted.”
In other words: don’t pinch me just yet.
