Tom Brady was one of the last ones out of the shower, perhaps hoping some extra hot water would help take the sting out of a crushing Super Bowl loss. In a nearly deserted New England Patriots locker room, he sat, wearily pulling on his boots, the pained look on his face never changing.

A few moments earlier, Joe Montana had walked down the hallway just outside, but there would be no meeting of Super Bowl greats. Nor would Brady join Montana in another way, as a four-time NFL champion - something he seemed destined to be at one point in the fourth quarter.

This was not a night when legacies would be debated. That will have to wait for another time, another place, another Super Bowl. For the second time in the past five Super Bowls, Brady had come up oh-so-short, beaten late once again by the New York Giants and another quarterback starting to make a pretty good name for himself, too.

Brady wasn't going to come out and say it, but he was blaming himself. Had to, because he had the ball in his hand to win the game with 57 seconds left and couldn't deliver the long touchdown drive that Patriots fans and even his teammates thought would be forthcoming.

"It's Tom Brady," said Patriots cornerback Kyle Arrington. "A lot of people were thinking whoever had the ball last was going to win."

Not on this night.

The two-point safety on the Brady's first play of the night turned out to be costly. Without it, the Patriots would have needed just a field goal to win, not a touchdown.

Then there was the catch Wes Welker always makes that he failed to make. It came on a Brady pass with 4 minutes left when it appeared the Patriots were ready to drive for a score that might have put the game away.

It's a team game, Brady kept repeating afterward. It was the team, he kept saying, that came up short.

"We all wish we could have done a bit more," he said. "That's what it comes to in football. It always comes down to one or two plays. If you make them you're celebrating. If you don't, you don't sleep for a week."

Brady looked like he surely would be having some sleepless nights. The celebrity quarterback with the celebrity wife sat at a podium afterwards, a few days growth of beard on his face and his hair nowhere near perfect. He tried to be philosophical, tried to say all the right things, but there was a certain hollowness to the words and he looked like he would like to be somewhere, anywhere, else.

"We fought to the end and I'm proud of that," he said. "Then we got to the 50 or so and we just ran out of time."

Not before trying one final desperation pass that was batted down in the end zone, just barely out of the reach of Rob Gronkowski. So close - again.

No one even brought up the 16 straight passes Brady completed, breaking the record of 13 straight set by Montana in the 1990 Super Bowl. It was a nice run in the second and third quarters, but nice runs don't always win games and on this night it was a record Brady would probably just as soon forget.

The one he wanted was four Super Bowl wins by a quarterback, something that would have put him in the elite company of Montana and Terry Bradshaw. Not just for himself, but for a team he has now led to a remarkable five Super Bowl appearances in 11 years.

The author Tim Dahlberg is an AP sports columnist

(China Daily 02/07/2012 page24)