FOXBOROUGH - Even with the calendar turning and a new season rapidly approaching (OTAs isn’t real football), the loss in Super Bowl LX still lingers for a couple of key contributors to the run.
“I watched a little. It still stings, to be honest with you,” Hunter Henry told us earlier this week. “Obviously, we didn’t play to the capability that we wanted to play at all on the biggest stage, and that was very disappointing and hard to process for a while. Definitely has taken a while. It still stings. But I think that is good. That’s good that it stings. It’s good. It makes you want to work a little harder to get all the way to the end. To then not achieve it was hard.”
“It’s disappointing. It stings, it hurts,” Robert Spillane added. “It feels like that wasn’t supposed to be a part of our journey, but obviously it is. All you can do from that is learn from it, grow as a person as a player, and that’s our focus.”
The season was magical. Unexpected on many levels. As the wins started adding up, the expectations grew. And yet, the Pats still delivered in the face of increasing pressure. It was remarkable, right up until it wasn’t. The Seahawks were better. They played better right from the start. So the storybook season ended with a whimper.
“Obviously, getting there was big, but we didn’t make it all the way. We didn’t do enough,” Henry said. “So, you’ve got to look at yourself in the mirror. What can you do more? How can you be better? How can I be a better teammate? How can I be a better player so that at the end we can hoist that trophy and not be the one to walk off the field?”
So Henry, Spillane and plenty of others who return from that team can now call on the experience. However, a couple of newcomers who will be depended on heavily - Dre’Mont Jones and Alijah Vera-Tucker - won’t have that same recall. Jones is entering his 9th season; Vera-Tucker is embarking on year 6. Neither has appeared in a single playoff game.
“I haven't experienced the playoffs since college football,” Jones said on Thursday. “So I'm eager to be out there in the later parts of January, instead of just doing the first week in January and (then) I go home and try to figure out a vacation … I want to experience that in the atmosphere and be a part of something greater.
“The whole experience - I've heard so many different stories. I know a lot of different guys around the leagues, so then I feel like everybody's been to the playoffs, except me. So I've heard it all, and it's all been consistent: it's great. You want to be there. There's nothing like it. I've been hearing those words for so many years, and I think it's time for me to be able to explain that to somebody who hasn't been.”
“Very hungry, man,” Vera-Tucker said. “It's unfortunate … In the league for six years, and you haven't been to the playoffs yet. But that's something I really look forward to. And obviously, everybody knows it's not given, it's definitely earned. So, everything that we did last year, no one really cares. It's all about getting back there, what we could do, you know, each individual day, to strive for that.”
The acknowledgment that is not a given rings very true when you’ve played as long as both these guys have - in Vera-Tucker’s case, in particular - and never come close to sniffing a postseason berth. The team they’ve joined now has that on their resume, but teams change, players get older, situations are different (look at the schedule, for instance) and now, as defending AFC Champs, so too does the size of the target on your back.
Unlike the last few years, no one is going to look at the Patriots on their schedule and automatically think, ‘Win.” Nope. Those days are gone, until (if?) the Pats prove that they can’t handle their 2025-26 success. Which is why building this thing from the ground floor up again is the only way to go about it.