FOXBOROUGH — A year ago Joe Flacco had walked along the corridor to the visitors’ locker room along with his fellow zombies. The winning touchdown pass had been knocked away, the tying field goal had sailed wide, and a season had ended one game early. This time, it was Flacco taking a knee at Gillette Stadium and striding down the same hall into the same room as a conqueror and his jubilant teammates whooped around him.
Baltimore did it the hard way this season, stifling the Colts in the wild-card game, shocking the Broncos in double-overtime at altitude, and handing the Patriots their first home defeat in an AFC Championship game.
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Joe Flacco has earned a starting role on a very good NFL team. Nut "conquering hero" he has not earned. My grandmother could have quarterbacked the Ravens in the game aginst the Patriots.
The conquering heros of the game have to be the offensive linemen for the Ravens. Those nameless (for the most part) laboring giants kept some of the league's toughest defensive players more than spitting distance from Flacco for the entire game. zfor what seemed like minutes on every offensive pass play, Flacco looked calmly around the fied until one of his receivers got himself open enough to gently lob a pass to him.
Without the Ravens offensive line playing as it did, Flacco's name would never make any printed part of a newspaper, except the obituaries.