FOXBOROUGH, Mass. – Lee Evans buried his face in both hands, sitting alone at his locker in abject sadness as the Baltimore Ravens’ dreams of a Super Bowl were extinguished by a nightmarish ending.
Team owner Steve Bisciotti headed down the hallway wearing a grim expression with a saddened Cal Ripken following closely behind him.
And veteran free safety Ed Reed struck a musical chord that captured the emotional aftermath of the Baltimore Ravens’ heartbreaking AFC Championship game loss to the New England Patriots, singing a Teddy Pendergrass classic called "Love TKO."
The lyrics: "Think I’d better let it go, looks like another love KO. Takin’ the bumps and the bruises … Of all the things of a two-time loser, tryin’ to hold on, faith is gone. It’s just another sad song. I think I’d better let it go."
It was that kind of bitter, reflective moment for the Ravens as they were wounded deeply by a devastating 23-20 loss to the top-seeded Patriots on Sunday night at Gillette Stadium despite quarterback Joe Flacco silencing his critics by outdueling Patriots star quarterback Tom Brady.
The Ravens will relive the final minutes for a long time, especially kicker Billy Cundiff.
In the aftermath of kicker Cundiff’s crushing missed field goal, Pro Bowl outside linebacker Terrell Suggs was seen delivering this message of shock on the sideline: "Oh, my God."
Cundiff flubbed a normally routine 32-yard field goal try with 15 seconds remaining while trailing by three points, hooking it wide left and costing the Ravens a chance to tie the game and send it into overtime.
"It’s a kick I’ve kicked a thousand times in my career, there’s really no excuse for it," a solemn Cundiff said. "I get paid to make field goals. I don’t get paid to miss field goals. You know that Ray Lewis has poured his heart out, and you don’t know how many years he has left. To let him down is pretty tough."
The snap from Morgan Cox and the hold from punter Sam Koch were textbook perfect. Cundiff simply missed a kick the Ravens absolutely had to have.
"I feel for Billy, he put his heart and soul out there to win it for us," Koch said. "It’s just really unfortunate. Everything felt fine. It was just one of those things that happened to go off to the left."
Cundiff wasn’t alone in feeling pain, and accepting blame for the final outcome.
Two plays before Cundiff missed the big kick, Evans was unable to secure the ball on a potential game-winning touchdown pass from Flacco.
While Evans was attempting to haul in the pass, Patriots cornerback Sterling Moore snatched it away from him.
"It was an opportunity for us to the go to the Super Bowl, and I let it go," said Evans, a veteran receiver who hadn’t even been to the playoffs before until this month and caught three passes for 39 yards Sunday. "The most disappointing part of all of this is that I feel personally that I let everybody down," Evans said. "This is the greatest team I’ve been on, and I feel like I let everybody down. It’s hard to sit here and accept how or why things happened. It was a great pass by Joe, and it was just a pass that was not completed by me. Nobody else can take the fall for that. It’s as tough as it gets."
NFL replay officials in the press box quickly concluded there was no clear visual evidence to overturn the call since Evans didn’t control the ball with both feet down.
"They didn’t feel like it was close enough to be reviewed," Evans said. "That’s how it goes."
"I thought it was a touchdown," offensive tackle Michael Oher said. "I don’t know what else you got to do to score. It looked like a touchdown to me."
So, the Patriots advanced to their seventh Super Bowl to play the New York Giants in Indianapolis despite Brady being intercepted twice with no touchdowns and Flacco throwing two touchdown passes with one interception.
This marks the second time in the past four years that the Ravens’ season was halted one game away from the Super Bowl, losing four years ago in the AFC championship game to the Pittsburgh Steelers.
"This feeling, we’ll take it," said Pro Bowl running back Ray Rice, who was limited to 67 yards on 21 carries. "We’ll taste it. We’ll use it as fuel in the offseason. We only live once.
"These moments in the locker room we’ll embrace as a team. I’m not a guy who points any fingers. They made more plays than we made."
"It’s two great football teams, two gladiators, just kind of going at each other at the end, and I’m proud of our guys," Ravens coach John Harbaugh said. "You know, we’ve got 53 guys, mighty men, as we like to call them. And they fought, and we came up a little bit short, as 53. You know, 53 win and 53 lose."
The game-winning touchdown was scored by Brady when he jumped over the top of the Ravens’ defense for a one-yard score with 11:29 in the fourth quarter to retake the lead.
"It was the biggest game of my career, so it’s the biggest loss of my career," strong safety Bernard Pollard said. "It hurts, it sucks. We got to bounce back some way, somehow. To do what we did, that’s hard. For us, we got to find a way to get back there."
Brady said the Ravens looked vulnerable on fourth-and-goal at their one-yard line.
"I thought it looked soft in there, so I tried to take advantage of us getting an easy touchdown," Brady said. "I don’t do that very often. I’m glad we had a chance to score there. That was important."
After that score, the Ravens squandered prime opportunities to either retake the lead with a touchdown or tie it with a field goal.
After Flacco was intercepted by linebacker Brandon Spikes on an ill-advised throw over the middle intended for tight end Ed Dickson, the Ravens got the ball right back when rookie cornerback Jimmy Smith intercepted Brady in the end zone off a pass deflection from strong safety Bernard Pollard.
Rather than have Cundiff attempt a potentially game-tying 50-yard field goal, the Ravens had Flacco attempt a pass on 4th-and-6. The pass to tight end Dennis Pitta fell incomplete.
"We just felt like from a percentage standpoint," Harbaugh said, "we probably had a better chance of getting the first down."
After the missed field goal by Cundiff, Brady was able to kneel down once to run out the clock.
It was his 16th postseason win, tying Joe Montana for the most in NFL history.
Despite losing an AFC title game for the second time and not being granted his wish for the referees to review Evans’ dropped pass, Harbaugh is convinced the Ravens have a bright future.
"Obviously a disappointing, stunning loss at the end there," Harbaugh said. "I thought our guys played their hearts out. We made plays and came up a play or two short at the end, but it doesn’t lessen what they accomplished this year, and it doesn’t lessen what they accomplished in this game. I like our football team and I like where we are going."
The loss overshadows one of Flacco’s best games as he connected on 22 of 36 passes for 306 yards and hit Pitta and rookie wide receiver Torrey Smith with scoring tosses from six and 29 yards, respectively.
The Ravens led 20-16 after Flacco’s touchdown pass to Smith and a 39-yard Cundiff field goal preceded by Patriots running back Danny Woodhead’s lost fumble on a kickoff.
Flacco was criticized heavily in the week before kickoff. That included Reed accusing Flacco of being rattled and not having a hold on the offense during a 20-13 AFC divisional playoff win over the Houston Texans.
"I don’t know if I ever will prove anything," Flacco said. "I just play the same way. We lost, someone has to, but we laid it all out on the field."
His teammates were a bit more blunt and outspoken when it came to sticking up for him.
"He played his butt off. He played his tail off," Pollard said. "For the people that keep dogging him, if you ain’t never played this game, shut up, shut up. Flacco played his tail off. He’s a winner."
Added Rice: "It wasn’t me today, it was Joe Flacco. I would appreciate if some of the people that criticize him lay off him now. That’s my quarterback."
Meanwhile, veteran middle linebacker Ray Lewis insisted that this won’t be his last game.
And Suggs is already plotting plans for going a step further next season.
"It sucks," Suggs said. "It was a special year from start to finish. Even with 22 seconds left, we thought we had it. But hey, congrats to them, can’t take anything from them.
"Rest assured, we are going back to work. We’re going to take the necessary time off, but when we train, we know what our destiny is."
