01:00 AM EST on Tuesday, January 3, 2006

Pretend for a second that you spent most of the fall on some desert island somewhere, somewhere without newspapers and SportsCenter, some place where no one ever heard of Tom Brady.

Pretend for a second that you knew nothing about the Patriots' season until about a month ago. Nothing about the day they got slapped around by San Diego at home, looking like they couldn't stop a flag football team, never mind the Chargers. Nothing about that night when the Indianapolis Colts put up 40 points against them. Nothing about that afternoon they got beat up in Kansas City by the Chiefs.

Pretend for a second you left that desert island on the first of December, right before the Pats went on their four-game winning streak.

Wouldn't everything look different now?

It would to me.

Sometimes we know too much, have seen this team too much. We have seen them struggle against too many teams early in the season, too many games where they seemed so very different than the

team that won the last two Super Bowls. We have have heard about too many injuries, seen a defense that was depleted. That's our mental picture, and we can't get it out of our heads. We close our eyes and see defensive backs getting beat. We close our eyes and see this team unable to stop good teams.

But things change.

Tedy Bruschi comes back. Richard Seymour comes back. Corey Dillon gets healthy. Some young defensive backs grow up. A team starts to believe in itself again.

Things change.

That's what a season does: it changes things. Some teams get better. Some get worse. Some teams are able to fight through adversity, become better off for it. Others crumble in its face. Players either get hurt or get beaten down. That's the great subtext to any NFL season, this sense it's always fluid, evolving, changing, that what you see late in the season often can be very different than what you see early in the season.

To the point that this is now a Patriots team that's very different than the one that got blasted by the Chargers on the first Sunday in October. In fact, I would contend that game is now irrelevant, almost as if it happened in some different season. That it was a game played by a different team.

I also would contend that the first two months of the Patriots' season are also irrelevant now, offer little insight into how this team is going to do in the playoffs.

Regardless of how they do, though, they deserve heaps of credit for being where they are this morning. For this season could have gotten away from them, no question about it. Go back to the first Sunday in November, the night the Colts tap-danced on their heads, and the Pats were 4-4, the very essence of mediocrity. They had given up 40 points to the Colts, 41 to the Chargers, and the only thing that figured to get them into the playoffs was that they played in a division where everyone else was worse.

Not that anyone believed in them.

They were what they were, as the Tuna used to say, right?

They were just another flawed team.

So it would have been easy to emotionally pack it in. Easy to write this season off. Too many injuries. The loss of two coordinators. Use any excuse you want. No one would have criticized then, for how do you criticize a team that's won two straight Super Bowls?

The answer is you don't.

That they didn't pack it in, that they somehow managed to survive that stretch when they weren't very good, saved their season. Credit Bill Belichick. Credit a core of veteran players who know what it takes to win. Credit anyone you want. One theory is that the loss to the Chiefs was the key, that afterwards the Pats' defensive strategy became more aggressive, attacking more, with more blitzes, more in the style that once made them so hard to beat.

Whatever.

Maybe it's this simple: they got some players back.

But somehow, someway, the Pats found a way to fight through their adversity and find a new season, a new life. And while they have yet to play against a top quarterback in the last month, have no doubt benefitted by playing within their weak division, they now enter the playoffs a different team than they were five weeks ago, even if it's just confidence.

And if you spent the fall on some desert island somewhere, someplace far removed from newspapers and SportsCenter, somewhere where you didn't see the Chiefs and the Colts treat them like scout team, they look pretty good.

brenold@projo.com/

401-277-7340