harrison

FOXBORO — It’s going to be tough for the Patriots to repeat last year’s sensational record-breaking season.

It was a season in which the Patriots became the first team in NFL history to finish a 16-game regular season undefeated.

It was a season in which quarterback Tom Brady, the most valuable player of the NFL, broke the regular-season record with 50 touchdown passes. In addition, wide receiver Randy Moss broke the NFL record for the most receptions for a TD in the regular season, with 23. Those 23 touchdown passes from Brady to Moss were also an NFL record between a passer and a receiver in a season.

Brady and Moss were they primary reasons the Patriots scored an NFL-record 589 points, and scored an NFL-record 75 touchdowns. They also broke their own consecutive regular-season win mark with an NFL-record 19 consecutive victories.

The accolades went on and on.

The Patriots had 21 players score touchdowns, which tied an NFL record set by the 1987 Los Angeles Rams and tied by the 2000 Denver Broncos.

There were also a number of team records that the Patriots broke. If you ask any of the Patriots, however, they will tell you that they would throw all of those records away for the victory in Super Bowl XLII, which they lost to the New York Giants, 17-14, spoiling their perfect season.

It was a heartbreaking loss, but the Patriots are over it now.

“I don’t think you have a pity party when you prepare and you give everything. When you lay everything out on the line, there is no need for a pity party,” Patriots safety Rodney Harrison said last month at the Patriots minicamp. “You give everything — your heart, your soul. You sacrifice things with your family and things that you normally wouldn’t sacrifice, so there is no pity party for me because I laid it all out on the line.”

His teammates feel the same way.

“Any time you lose a game, it’s disappointing,” Brady said at minicamp. “[The Super Bowl], because it’s the last game of the year, it’s very disappointing. But we’ve lost a lot of games in the past, too. The more you focus on what’s happened and what you can’t control, the less energy you’re going to focus on the things you need to do to improve.

“Coach (Bill) Belichick, I think, gets it out of his mind pretty quickly. You evaluate the loss and hope you learn from it and then you move on. You gain the experience and the knowledge of what got you beat, or in some cases what helped you win the game — in this case we lost the game — and you try to incorporate those into what we’re doing this season.”

Putting last season behind them will help the Patriots focus on this season.

“You win them, you put them behind you. You lose them, you put them behind you,” Patriots linebacker Tedy Bruschi said last week. “No matter what it is, you have to move on and worry about the new challenges you have on your team. Now we have plenty with the new faces on the team and the new coaches on the coaching staff. We have a lot of work to do for this season. Last season, all the other seasons, the Super Bowl victories and losses, those are all in the [history] books.”

It’s going to be tough to repeat last season’s record-breaking performance, but the Patriots plan on playing better this year than they did last year.

“We just have to keep getting better, day by day,” Harrison said. “That has always been our perspective and really our goal is to really take it day by day and not get caught up in where we were at and what we’ve done in the past because it really has no effect on what is going to happen in the future.”

Said Brady, “I think it’s always [about] team improvement. We’re always trying to find ways to evolve as a team and evolve as an offense. You realize that a lot of the things we did last year probably won’t work this year. It’s important to move forward and understand things that we need to do better.”

With the Patriots high-powered offense intact, much of the focus will be on New England’s defense, which features a lot of new faces, during training camp.

“You need to start from square one no matter where you are — offense, defense or special teams, even the players that have been here,” Belichick said during minicamp. “We all have to start at the bottom and build it up brick by brick one day at a time, and that’s what we are trying to do.”

roblee@projo.com