Borges: Patriots

FOXBORO — Whatever this was a preview of, if anything, let’s see it again.

In a season filled with less than compelling matchups all across the NFL, and most especially here in New England, an outlier appeared last night at Gillette Stadium. A great battle broke out between the Patriots and the Seattle Seahawks, two teams able enough to show their great strengths and just as able to expose the other’s Achilles’ heel.

For the Patriots, there was their lodestar, Tom Brady. The parish priest who absolves many sins time and again brought the Patriots back with a gritty determination against a Seahawks defense that hit him — and everything else that moved — like the Legion of Boom it once was.

Safety Earl Thomas hit Rob Gronkowski so hard in the first half, the tight end seemed like a reduced version of himself the final 30 minutes. They hit Brady high and low, the latter leading to a flag on safety Kam Chancellor that he surely felt was worth the effort. Unlike Gronkowski, Brady was unmoved by the Seahawks’ penchant for violent confrontation.

These kind of gritty nights from Brady have become so commonplace, they sometimes go undervalued. It is, it sometimes seems, what Brady does. While that is true, it minimizes the difficulty of standing up to a defense like Seattle’s and answering back each time your own cracks.

And crack it did, allowing Seattle to penetrate its red zone six times in nine drives. Argue all you want that they bent but didn’t break, but the truth is they shattered. They were not a good defense before the trade of Jamie Collins, and as the Seahawks made clear, they were a worse one last night.

Seattle came in with the league’s 26th-ranked offense and put 420 yards on the Patriots. Worse, a team averaging 20.3 points per game — 23rd in the NFL — hung 31, and it could have been worse if Russell Wilson put a little touch on a couple of end-zone throws.

What this all added up to was a great game between two good but flawed teams. They might even be the two best, although Dallas, Oakland and a few other equally flawed teams will have something to say before it’s finished.

It proved you can still find a great NFL game from time to time, but not one between two great teams. It will be between two good teams, each with their own serious flaws and each with an equal chance to win.

The Patriots are not a great team this year, but that does not mean they cannot become a championship team. Same is true of the Seahawks, who can’t run the ball and don’t get after the quarterback with quite the ferocity they did at their height.

They produced a great struggle that quite rightly ended on the 1-yard line, with Gronkowski and Chancellor doing hand-to-hand combat in the end zone as Brady’s lofted pass squirted off the tight end’s hands.

Fans booed the officials of course, because there is never a reason the Patriots lose that is the result of the other team’s good play. It’s the officials, poor play by their own players, bad coaching by some of Bill Belichick’s acolytes. Never the other team, even though in this case the other team came more than 3,000 miles into Gillette Stadium and exposed a defense that, when the season began, was being touted as “top five.” Last night, it mostly looked topsy-turvy.

Russell Wilson threw for 348 yards and three touchdowns, all to Doug Baldwin, in case no one noticed. Which, apparently, the Patriots defense did not.

Time and again, Wilson made plays on a defense that seldom got to him because its pass rush now resides in Arizona and Ohio, where Chandler Jones and Jamie Collins were traded for zippo. They were moves made “in the best interest of the team,” we were told. One wonders which team last night?

A year ago, half the town wanted to crown Jabaal Sheard as the next Reggie White. You had to hire a private detective to find him last night, which frankly has been the case since Jones was shipped out of town.

In one of the game’s biggest plays, Collins’ replacement — rookie sixth-round draft pick Elandon Roberts — was scorched by running back C.J. Prosise for a 38-yard pass on third-and-6, putting the ball on the 2 and setting up the field goal that put the Seahawks in the lead for good with 8:56 to play. Think Collins would have played it better and more athletically?

Anybody see Barkevious Mingo in Collins’ spot? Kyle Van Noy? Shea McClellin?

Jon Bostic? Oh, yeah. He’s already gone too.

On a night when the opponent took away his running game and Gronkowski, Brady could not absolve all the sins of such a flawed defense. He passed for 316 yards but no touchdowns and only three connections with his binky in six tries. One nearly got him decapitated by Thomas, a hit that changed the mood of things.

In the end, what we had was a great night of exciting football played by what the NFL is made up of this year. Seriously flawed teams with great strengths and deadly weaknesses.

What we also had was a warning that the Patriots may ultimately win the championship, but this will be no coronation. It will be a dogfight between a half-dozen flawed equals.