Patriots’ linebacker Tedy Bruschi relflects the team’s mood last night after their loss to Indianapolis. Complete coverage in Sports, B1

John Freidah / John Freidah

So it ended.

The Patriots’ quest to get back to the Super Bowl.

Their quest for NFL immortality, the chance to be only the second team in history to win four Super Bowls in six years.

Their season.

So it ended, in a beauty of an AFC Championship Game in the RCA Dome in Indianapolis; ended in the dying seconds when they were down four points with less than a minute to play, and Tom Brady was, once again, trying to go into his bag of tricks and come out with one more miracle.

He had done it last week in San Diego. He had done it so many times in his amazing career. But he couldn’t do it last night, a night that belonged to Peyton Manning and the Colts, a night for some validation for Manning.

Throughout his storied career, the knock on Manning has been that he couldn’t win the Big One, couldn’t win the big playoff game he had to win. Last night he did, bringing his team back from a 21-3 deficit midway through the second quarter, when the Colts looked lost and bewildered and it appeared that the Pats were on cruise control to another Super Bowl.

But in the end, in a great shootout between Brady and the Pats, it was Manning who led the Colts down the field in the closing minutes, finally taking their first lead of the game, 38-34, with just 59 seconds left to play.

In the end it was Brady and the rest of the Patriot offense that could just sit and watch as it became all too apparent that the Pats’ defense simply could not stop Manning and the Colts.

But sing no sad songs for the Patriots.

To do that is to take this great Patriot run of the past six years for granted, to lose sight of the context this is all taking place in to lose sight of the fact that we’re watching history here. New England history. Sports history.

History, period.

And iconic figures, too.

Bill Belichick no longer is just a great football coach, this man who was born to X’s and O’s and came of age sitting his father’s feet as he broke down game film as the longtime assistant at the Naval Academy; this man who has turned game plans into a cerebral activity.

He is now seen as a coach for the ages, right there with all the greats from the dusty pages of NFL history, a coach of legend, someone whose name will be forever be remembered for as long as there’s an NFL, as long as there is professional football.

Complete with his own style, as idiosyncratic as it might be.

Call it a non-style.

In this age of celebrity coaches, of self-promotion and always knowing where the camera is, Belichick is different. It is somehow symbolic that his public image has been defined by a formless gray hooded sweatshirt, something with all the style of white sneakers and black socks on a beach.

No matter that he makes millions of dollars. No matter that he has the cachet of as man who has won three Super Bowl titles in the past five years. His public persona is of just another guy who goes to work in a sweatshirt.

This is the attitude he’s passed on to his team. Come to work every day and bring your lunch bucket. Come to play and work harder than the other guy, be smarter. Execute the game plan and good things will happen.

So it was yesterday in the first quarter, the Pats down near the Colts’ goal line, when Patriot rookie Laurence Maroney fumbled a Brady handoff, the ball up for grabs. It appeared the Colts were going to recover, but somehow there was the ball squirting out from a pile and there was Patriot tackle Logan Mankins falling on it in the end zone for a touchdown, getting the Pats on the scoreboard first.

Lucky?

Heads up?

Opportunistic?

Call it anything you want.

It’s the kind of play this team seems to live on in playoff games, an example of the attitude that survives, even as many of the players change, the assistant coaches change, everything changes.

Even with Brady.

Take away his celebrity and his cover-boy fame, take away the runway girlfriend, and what remains is that he buys into Belichick’s vision as if he’s a surrogate son. He is the quintessential team guy, all about winning in ways that great players not always are. He has become some quarterback who has sprung out of the pages of adolescent fiction, someone who never says the wrong thing, and makes every big play, too. Even if he ran out of miracles last night.

Belichick and Brady.

Two men who forever have cemented their reputations in the history of sports in New England, regardless of what happens in the future.

As has this team.

They have given us an unbelievable ride these past six years, one that seemed to come out of nowhere. Who could have dreamed of Foxboro, Massachusetts, as the most glamorous address in the whole NFL? Who could ever have envisioned what the Patriots now mean in New England?

Last night does nothing to change that.

Regardless of the final score.