1) Congrats to the Saints and their fans. For the rest of us, the game was entertaining and was capped off by a nice pick-6 and the Manning Face (and schadenfreude for Pats fans).
2) 3 Penalties called in the whole game. Wish there was more of that during the regular season. The refs let them play. There were a few tangles down the field that would have caused yellow flags to fly in a regular season game in Indianapolis (just for instance, of course).
3) Former ProJo scribe Tom Curran contrasts the Colts failure with the most recent Patriots failure (in 2007) and adds historical perspective:
From a team standpoint, this is a horrific result because the Colts passed on a chance to chase history under the flimsy excuse that they were more concerned with achieving the goal of winning the Super Bowl....The 2009 Colts passed on the chance to be historic. Instead of trying to become the best team of all time, they decided they just wanted to be the best team in 2009. And they couldn't even do that....Play to win.With the Patriots, you had a team that had the guts to try to be perfect, a team that was willing to take the best shot of every opponent all year long to try and achieve greatness. When they lost in the Super Bowl, it was because the New York Giants beat them.
With the Colts, you have a team that was afraid of the pressure, afraid of "what if." They were a team that risked putting players on the field to achieve personal milestones in the final weeks of the season but ran like hell from trying to achieve the ultimate team milestone. And when they lost to the Saints Sunday night...they really got what they deserved for disrespecting the enormity of what they were on the verge of accomplishing. 18-1 would have sucked. But 16-3? Just in a pile with the rest of the teams.