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The Seattle Seahawks dominated the New England Patriots en route to a 29-13 victory in Super Bowl LX on Sunday. The effort was led by Seattle’s stifling defense and an efficient, mistake-free effort on offense.

We’ve collected a series of key numbers that truly tell the story of this matchup.

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0

The amount of points the Patriots scored in the first half. Zero is also the number of teams that have won the Super Bowl after getting shut out in the first half. Those teams are now 0-15 in Super Bowls.

1

The Seahawks are the first team in NFL history to win the Super Bowl while committing zero turnovers in the postseason.

2

The Seahawks collected their second Super Bowl title in franchise history. They are the 17th team to win multiple Super Bowls.

3

Seattle’s Mike Macdonald became the third coach in NFL history to: lead a No. 1 scoring defense as a coordinator, lead a No. 1 scoring defense as a head coach and win a Super Bowl as a head coach. The other two are Bill Belichick and Chuck Noll.

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5

Sam Darnold became the first Super Bowl champion quarterback while playing for a fifth different team. He previously played for the Jets, Panthers, 49ers and Vikings before signing with the Seahawks last year.

8

Before Kenneth Walker III won Super Bowl LX MVP, there were eight previous running backs to win the award. The last one was 28 years ago, when Denver Broncos RB Terrell Davis won it in Super Bowl XXXII.

9

The Seahawks lost three games this season by a combined nine points. Only six other Super Bowl champs have finished a season with a combined margin of defeat under 10 points for the season.

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12

Seattle improved to 12-0 on the season, including playoffs, when scoring first in a game. They led 19-0 in Super Bowl LX before allowing a Patriots touchdown in the fourth quarter.

28

The Seahawks’ quarterback pressures in the Super Bowl, their most in a single game in the NextGenStats era. Patriots tackle Will Campbell gave up 14 of those pressures, a single-game high for any player in the playoffs or regular season this season, according to NFL Network’s Jack Andrade.

1 million

By winning the Super Bowl, Seahawks QB Sam Darnold cashed a $1 million contract incentive. It’s a cherry on top of a storybook season for Darnold, who signed a three-year, $100 million deal with Seattle last offseason.

New England Patriots wide receiver Kyle Williams found himself playing a little defense at Super Bowl LX.

In the fourth quarter of the Patriots’ clash with the Seattle Seahawks, a shirtless fan ran onto the field and evaded security enough to reach the open field at Levi’s Stadium. Normally, players just ignore field invaders unless the person enters their personal space.

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Williams had other ideas, chasing down the man until he slid to the ground quarterback-style. A mob of security personnel proceeded to tackle him.

The man was arrested and later booked on charges of misdemeanor trespassing and field intrusion, a Santa Clara Police Department spokesman told TMZ.

Williams was a third-round pick in the 2025 NFL Draft out of Washington State and posted 209 receiving yards and three touchdowns in his rookie year, along with 290 yards on 11 kickoff returns.

In the NFL scouting combine, he ran a 4.40 40-yard dash, in case you were curious what kind of speed that fan had running behind him.

The play preceded some good fortune for the Patriots, who were down 19-0 at that point in what was so far one of the worst offensive performances in Super Bowl history. New England quarterback Drake Maye proceeded to hit wide receiver Mack Hollins for a 24-yard gain, then a 35-yard touchdown pass to ensure the Patriots wouldn’t be the first team shut out in the Super Bowl.

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The Seahawks won 29-13 to collect their second Super Bowl title in franchise history.

The Seattle Seahawks entered Sunday’s Super Bowl one dominant performance away from establishing their defense as one of the greatest of all time.

Mission accomplished.

Anchored by a dominant defensive effort, the Seahawks rolled to a 29-13 win over the New England Patriots for the franchise’s second Super Bowl championship. While Kenneth Walker III and Sam Darnold did what was needed on offense, Seattle’s defense dominated the game and the highlight reel.

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Here are the five plays that defined Seattle’s Super Bowl victory:

Derick Hall’s second sack leads to turnover

While Seattle had thoroughly dominated the game through three quarters, the outcome wasn’t settled. Thanks to failing to score a touchdown, Seattle’s lead was limited to two possessions at 12-0 as the third quarter wound down.

Derick Hall helped ensure that Seattle’s defensive efforts wouldn’t go to waste. With the Patriots facing third-and-5 near midfield in the final seconds of the quarter, Hall beat right tackle Morgan Moses and tracked down quarterback Drake Maye in a collapsing pocket.

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He poked the ball loose for a fumble that defensive tackle Byron Murphy II recovered.

The sack was the second of the game for Hall, who set the tone in the first quarter with a sack of Maye on New England’s first possession that ultimately forced a punt. Now he’d forced the first turnover of the game at a critical juncture in the second half.

Seahawks capitalize with Sam Darnold’s only TD

Seattle hadn’t done much with the ball up to that point while tallying four field goals through three quarters. But Sam Darnold and Co. capitalized on Hall’s strip sack.

Five plays after the turnover, Darnold found tight end AJ Barner for a 16-yard touchdown pass to extend Seattle’s lead to 19-0.

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In the end, it was Seattle’s only offensive touchdown of the game. It was enough to secure the win as a late New England scoring surge fell short.

Darnold didn’t have his best game while completing 19 of 38 passes for 202 yards with 1 touchdown. But he didn’t collapse or even make a notable mistake, which was all the Seahawks needed from him Sunday night.

Drake Maye’s bad interception

The Patriots responded to Darnold’s touchdown pass with their first score of the day on a quick-strike touchdown drive that covered 65 yards on three plays, keeping pressure on the Seahawks.

But on New England’s next possession, Seattle took the ball right back. With a chance to cut their deficit to one possession, the Patriots drove near midfield with momentum on their side. But Maye offered an underthrown ball into traffic that safety Julian Love intercepted and returned 35 yards.

Before the pick, that was New England’s best chance to make it a game.

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Seahawks score on defense

If Maye’s first interception didn’t ice the game, his second did. With Seattle holding a 22-7 lead late in the fourth quarter, Maye wound up for what was intended to be a deep pass. It barely moved forward. Cornerback Devon Witherspoon hit him as he released the ball.

Linebacker Uchenna Nwosu snagged it and took it 45 yards for what initially looked like a fumble return for a touchdown.

Scorers ruled the play an interception instead of a fumble and recovery.

No matter. The result of the play was the same: a Seattle touchdown and a 29-7 lead.

Kenneth Walker’s big runs keep Seattle moving early

We’re cheating here a bit. This is two plays.

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But Kenneth Walker III’s back-to-back big runs early in the game kept an otherwise stagnant Seattle offense moving.

With Seattle holding a 3-0 lead early in the second quarter, Walker broke containment around the left edge and ran 30 yards down the sideline to get into New England territory.

After a Darnold incompletion on the ensuing first down, the Seahawks went back to Walker. He delivered again, this time with a 29-yard run up the middle and toward the right sideline to the New England 17.

Walker’s two runs accounted for more than the 55 yards Seattle gained on the drive and set up Jason Myers for a 39-yard field goal and a 6-0 Seattle lead.

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In the end, Walker’s efforts added up to 135 yards on 27 carries (5 yards per carry). And his two big first half runs were a big reason he won Super Bowl MVP.

DeMarcus Lawrence was right all along.

Lawrence and the Seattle Seahawks rolled to a win over the New England Patriots in Super Bowl LX on Sunday night in Santa Clara, California. That marked the franchise’s first championship in more than a decade, and the first of Lawrence’s career.

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But Lawrence knew that wasn’t going to happen for him with the Dallas Cowboys, the team that selected him with the No. 34 overall pick back in 2014. That’s why, after 11 seasons with the franchise, Lawrence opted for a change in free agency last offseason.

That resulted in him signing a three-year, $32.5 million deal with the Seahawks and, now months later, a Super Bowl ring.

While he wasn’t completely mean to the organization on his way out the door in Dallas, Lawrence didn’t hold back, either.

“Made my home there [in Dallas], my family lives there,” he said in March, in part. “I’m forever gonna be there, but I know for sure I’m not going to win a Super Bowl there.”

Those comments didn’t land well in Dallas, either. Former Cowboys star Micah Parsons, who is now with the Green Bay Packers, called them, “clown s**t.”

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Lawrence ended up with 53 total tackles and six sacks this season with the Seahawks. He earned his fifth Pro Bowl nod, too. The 33-year-old had two total tackles, one of them on his own, and both a pass deflection and a quarterback hit in the team’s 29-13 win over the Patriots on Sunday at Levi’s Stadium.

The Cowboys, after Lawrence left, went 7-9-1 and failed to make the playoffs for a second straight campaign. While the Cowboys have won five championships in the past, the team hasn’t been to a Super Bowl since 1996. Though Lawrence undoubtedly would have helped the Cowboys defense this past season, something it desperately needed, he just wanted to move on.

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That decision, it turned out, paid off not even a full calendar year later. With the Lombardi Trophy in hand, it’s hard to imagine Lawrence has any regrets about that move.

Nate Tice, Matt Harmon & Charles McDonald are LIVE reacting to Super LX. The Seattle Seahawks dominated the New England Patriots 29-13, and the trio join forces to recap the game, discuss what went wrong for Drake Maye and Josh McDaniels, where the Patriots go from here, where the Seahawks defense ranks all-time, Sam Darnold’s incredible comeback journey and much more.

(2:45) – Seahawks defense dominated the day

(14:45) – Sam Darnold & Kenneth Walker III’s big days

(40:30) – More thoughts from Super Bowl Week

🖥️ Watch this full episode on YouTube

Puka Nacua couldn’t help himself Sunday night.

But, in the midst of celebrating their Super Bowl win over the New England Patriots, Ernest Jones IV immediately shut him down in a way that only he could.

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Jones, after seeing a social media post by the Los Angeles Rams wide receiver made appearing to make fun of Seahawks quarterback Sam Darnold, clapped back perfectly.

“Ain’t you at home?” Jones wrote. “Goofy ass.”

Nacua, as the Rams fell to the Seahawks in the NFC championship game, was in fact watching Super Bowl LX from somewhere other than the field at Levi’s Stadium on Sunday night. So any criticism he may have of Darnold, at least in the eyes of Jones, is irrelevant. Darnold helped lead the Seahawks to their first Super Bowl title in well over a decade.

Darnold went 19-of-38 passing for 202 yards with a touchdown in the team’s 29-13 win over the Patriots. Darnold found AJ Barner for a 16-yard score early in the fourth quarter for the game’s first touchdown, which put them up 19-0 at the time.

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It was Darnold’s best season to date. The former No. 3 overall draft pick signed a three-year, $100.5 million deal with the Seahawks this past summer — which marked his fifth stop in eight seasons in the league. He’s now the first starting quarterback to win a Super Bowl in history after playing with that many teams.

While Nacua is coming off a great season of his own — he had a career-high 1,715 receiving yards and 10 touchdowns on a league-high 129 catches while averaging an NFL-best 107.2 yards per game — he does not yet have a Super Bowl ring to his name. Both Darnold and Jones have him beat there.

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — Sam Darnold, Super Bowl champion quarterback.

Whatever other chapters that are yet to be written about Darnold’s career — keep in mind, he’s still just 28 years old — what happened in Super Bowl LX will be the biggest part of it. Not being called a bust with the New York Jets and Carolina Panthers. Not even the year when he was very good with the Minnesota Vikings but that was washed away due to two bad games to end an otherwise fantastic season.

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We remember the quarterbacks who win Super Bowls. Darnold is in that club now after the Seattle Seahawks beat the New England Patriots 29-13.

Darnold said after Sunday’s victory, he had an emotional moment with his parents and his fiancée.

“I think that’s what got me a little bit,” Darnold said. “Me and my dad don’t cry very often.”

Darnold’s legend resonates, particularly with his teammates.

“Unbelievable story. I don’t know if there’s a quarterback in NFL history that’s done what he’s done. ” Seahawks receiver Cooper Kupp said. “To go through the things he had to go through the first, whatever, five years. To believe in himself, to overcome everyone who told him he wasn’t that guy anymore, to say he couldn’t be a starter or productive quarterback, to come back to work and commit to his process, and then go out there in the biggest moments this year, over and over again, show up.

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“It’s an unbelievable story.”

Darnold admittedly wasn’t at his best Sunday against the Patriots. He was just 19 of 38 for 202 yards. But he was good most of the season, including a 346-yard, three-touchdown game in the NFC championship game that helped Seattle get to the Super Bowl.

After the long odds Darnold faced just to be a regular starter again, much less a Super Bowl champion on his fifth team in eight seasons, the white Super Bowl champions hat and black Super Bowl champions T-shirt he wore after the game fit just fine.

“The reason I’m here is because of my journey,” Darnold said. “Because of the ups and downs, especially the downs I went through early on in my career. I learned so much about myself, about football.

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“It’s funny how it works.”

Sam Darnold keeps believing

Things were bleak for Darnold’s career. Usually quarterbacks who fail in their first two stops and then hit the backup phase of their career don’t rebound to have success stories. But Darnold said, in that moment after the game, he let his parents know how important they were to his comeback story.

“I’m here because of their belief in me,” Darnold said. “They believed in me throughout my entire career, and that’s why I was able to believe in myself. Some people called me crazy throughout for believing in myself so much and having so much confidence, but it was because of my parents.”

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Sunday wasn’t Darnold’s finest moment, and he admitted that. Neither the Seahawks nor Patriots scored a touchdown until the fourth quarter, but his 16-yard touchdown to A.J. Barner gave the Seahawks a 19-0 lead.

Darnold struggled to generate much offense, but he also didn’t turn it over during a game in which his defense was stifling.

“Offense, I feel like we didn’t play as good as we could have,” Darnold said. “I certainly didn’t play as good as I could have.

“I didn’t have my best stuff but our team had my back.”

Darnold joins a select list

The list of quarterbacks who have started and won a Super Bowl is fairly small and serious football fans remember every name. There have been some very good quarterbacks through the years who have been forgotten, but names like Trent Dilfer, Jeff Hostetler, Nick Foles, Doug Williams and Brad Johnson will always be associated with their Super Bowl championship teams.

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That will be Darnold from now on, and he still has plenty of time to add to his legacy. And it’s a pretty good Seattle team he’ll be associated with. The Seahawks went 14-3 in the regular season, with the losses by a combined nine points. They punctuated the season with a dominant performance over the Patriots. That win was driven by Seattle’s defense, but don’t diminish what Darnold meant to the Seahawks all season just because he didn’t have a great Super Bowl.

“Put some respect on it! He’s the best!” Seahawks receiver Jaxon Smith-Njigba said, cutting into a Darnold interview in the locker room. “We’re not here without that guy.”

Many of Darnold’s teammates through the week and after Super Bowl LX talked about how easy he is to root for, understanding the adversity he went through.

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“Everyone in that locker room believes in me,” Darnold said.

Darnold has plenty of critics who won’t let go of the reputation he built early in his career, after he didn’t pan out as the third overall pick to the Jets. When this season is brought up they’ll mention that he was carried by a great defense and in the Super Bowl he didn’t have the type of performance we typically equate to the winning quarterback.

And, who cares? Josh Allen and Lamar Jackson haven’t been to a Super Bowl yet. Neither has Justin Herbert or Dak Prescott. Joe Burrow hasn’t won one. Some of the greatest quarterbacks ever, like Brett Favre, Drew Brees and Aaron Rodgers, won only one Super Bowl. Dan Marino, Jim Kelly and Dan Fouts are among the great quarterbacks to never win one.

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Darnold has one. That’s all a legacy needs.

“I don’t think it’s really hit me yet,” Darnold said. “But it’s special.”

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — At some point, it became universally accepted that an NFL team needs an elite quarterback to win a Super Bowl.

“With our defense, the way they’ve been playing, my job was take care of the football,” said Sam Darnold, the starting quarterback for the Super Bowl LX champion Seattle Seahawks. “I knew that coming into the game. I did that.”

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There is more than one way to build a champion, and the Seahawks are a good example of figuring out a different method instead of chasing the rest of the league. That includes a quarterback who realized that all he needed to do to win a Super Bowl was not turn the ball over.

Seattle hired a defensive head coach, Mike Macdonald, when the rest of the league was infatuated with offensive whiz kids. The Seahawks built a defense with many good players but nobody who would rival Myles Garrett for NFL Defensive Player of the Year. (Maybe they do have one superstar, and we’ll get to him later.) The combination of Macdonald’s defensive scheme and the right players to fit it dominated the New England Patriots on Super Bowl Sunday.

“Defense wins championships!” Seahawks receiver Jaxon Smith-Njigba said after the game. “We’re not here without our defense.”

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The Seahawks did have a star quarterback in Russell Wilson, but when they could see the end of the road coming for their relationship, they made a bold trade that allowed them to move onto a new championship era.

They shifted to a quarterback in Darnold who is the 18th highest-paid quarterback in the NFL, in terms of annual average value on his deal. Darnold’s tale, of winning a Super Bowl on his fifth team after the NFL had mostly given up on him following a tough start to his career, is rare. And while he has unquestionably become a good quarterback, nobody would put him on the same tier as Josh Allen or a healthy Patrick Mahomes. But when the Seahawks wanted to upgrade from Geno Smith, Darnold was available and they found the right fit.

“We see him each day: He’s there early, he’s there late,” Seahawks safety Julian Love said. “He’s committed to the process and he puts in the work. And above all that, he’s just a good guy. It’s so easy to love him and cheer for him.”

Between Darnold winning the title this season and Jalen Hurts — who has played good football but has plenty of skeptics as well — winning the Super Bowl last year with the Eagles, there’s proof that you don’t need an MVP-level quarterback to win it all. It makes life easier in many ways, but there aren’t many of those guys to go around.

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Seattle didn’t reinvent football and how it’s played. Having a great defense with a special teams unit that consistently makes winning plays has never been a secret, though it doesn’t get talked about as much in this era of offensive football. There’s nothing wrong with the Seahawks’ offense either, it just got the job done with a quarterback who probably isn’t on the elite tier and was on the discard pile not long ago.

If the Seahawks can put together a champion based on sound, smart moves without an elite quarterback, what’s everyone else’s excuse?

Here are the winners and losers from Super Bowl LX:

WINNERS

Devon Witherspoon: Nothing against Kenneth Walker III, who won Super Bowl MVP. He had a good game. But the best player on the field was Witherspoon.

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Witherspoon has been an impact player since coming into the NFL as the fifth overall draft pick in 2023, and with Mike Macdonald’s scheme he has become one of the NFL’s best defensive players. After Sunday, he’ll get more notice. Witherspoon did it all against the Patriots. He had a sack and three quarterback hits on well-timed blitzes. He helped hold Patriots leading receiver Stefon Diggs to 37 yards on three catches as well. Macdonald had Kyle Hamilton when he was the Ravens’ defensive coordinator and while Witherspoon isn’t the same player, they both are tremendous assets in the scheme due to their versatility.

Witherspoon can do it all and after his Super Bowl dominance, he should start to get mentioned along with the great cornerbacks in the game.

“Whatever my coach needs me to do, I go out there and do,” Witherspoon said.

Metrics already loved Witherspoon. He was Pro Football Focus’ No. 1 graded cornerback this past season. Now he has a ring to go with it after a stellar Super Bowl. This was a day in which his reputation got a huge bump.

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“I just made the plays that came to me,” Witherspoon said. “It’s nothing crazy.”

Kenneth Walker III: Walker will be remembered as a Super Bowl MVP. He broke a strangely long drought for running backs winning the award, going back to Terrell Davis in Super Bowl XXXII, which was 28 years ago.

It also validates Walker as a player. He had been good for the Seahawks, with a pair of 1,000-yard rushing seasons in his first four years in the NFL, but when the Seahawks needed more of him after Zach Charbonnet’s torn ACL, he delivered in a big way.

Walker handled 27 of Seattle’s 29 running back carries in Super Bowl LX and gained 135 yards. Before the Super Bowl he had not had 20 carries in a game all season. Coming up big in the biggest game will now be remembered forever, thanks to his MVP.

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“He’s a special player,” Seahawks receiver Jaxon Smith-Njigba said. “He’s a special player.”

Mike Vrabel: It didn’t seem like it in the moment after being dominated in the Super Bowl, but Vrabel and the Patriots had a remarkable season.

They went 14-3 in the regular season, a stunning 10-game improvement from 2024. They’re a young team and while it’s hard to bank on going to another Super Bowl right away, they are set up well for the next few years.

Vrabel noted after the loss he had been on the job 307 days (Drake Maye repeated that number later, so it’s something Vrabel had made his team aware of), which was to point out that they’re still fairly early in the process of building a long-term winner.

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The Patriots might not be right back in a Super Bowl, but Vrabel showed they made the right hire.

“I’m sorry we didn’t get this done, but we’ll be back,” Patriots cornerback Christian Gonzalez said. “‘Vrabes has done an amazing job. Everybody on this team loves playing for him.”

Seahawks special teams: Seattle had the No. 1 special teams unit in DVOA this season, and it continued to show against the Patriots.

Kicker Jason Myers hit five field goals, the most in a single Super Bowl, and he also surpassed LaDainian Tomlinson for the most points by a player in a single year (regular season and playoffs) in NFL history, with 206 to Tomlinson’s 198 from his MVP season in 2006.

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Michael Dickson, meanwhile, punted seven times for an average of 47.9 yards and pinned New England deep on several occasions. That proved important in a game where the Seahawks largely leaned on their defense and run game.

LOSERS

Drake Maye: Fair or not, a rough Super Bowl will cast some doubt on Maye going into his third season.

It was a curious season. Maye barely missed winning NFL MVP over Matthew Stafford. He was great for most of the regular season. Then he had a poor postseason, though it didn’t cost the Patriots until the Super Bowl.

[Get more Patriots news: New England team feed]

Maye simply didn’t play well. He was pressured an astounding 28 times, most since Next Gen Stats kept track of the metric. But when throws were available to him, he often missed. He told reporters postgame that he received a painkiller shot in his right shoulder, where he suffered an injury in the AFC title game.

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For three quarters it looked like the Patriots might be the first Super Bowl team to be shut out.

“There’s plays I’ll think about for the next seven months,” Maye said.

He has a solid foundation. It’s hard to believe he won’t be one of the best quarterbacks in the NFL for a while. But after a rough Super Bowl and uninspiring playoff run, there will be more questions about him than you’d expect from an MVP runner-up.

Patriots’ offensive line: The Patriots weren’t supposed to be as far along in their rebuild as they were. Having a great season doesn’t change that they still have things to work on within the roster.

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One of those things is the offensive line. The Patriots had a terrible offensive line before this past season, and it was reasonable for most of this season. But it struggled in the playoffs. Maye was sacked six times in the Super Bowl. He was sacked five times in each of the Patriots’ first three playoff games. That’s unacceptable.

Left tackle Will Campbell, the fourth overall pick of the draft, struggled in the last few games as he seemed to hit a rookie wall. The Patriots will have to figure out what caused that, and keep building the line around him. Vrabel said the Seahawks didn’t do anything with their pressures that was unexpected. New England just struggled to protect.

“Sometimes we blocked them, sometimes we didn’t,” Vrabel said.

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — About 10 minutes into a despondent postgame sigh, the reality settled in for Drake Maye. The one that drops into the stomach for many quarterbacks who crumble into the negative side of the ledger in the biggest game of their lives. The one where you’ve lost a Super Bowl, and next comes losing part of the team that helped deliver  it.

One question after another, the New England Patriots quarterback stared just over the top of the microphone in front of him, but just below the gaze of the reporters encircling him. Eventually, his eyes began to well and his voice cracked.

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“I’m so proud,” he said, contemplating the Patriots’ unlikely run to Sunday’s Super Bowl. “That’s probably the reason I’m choked up the most.”

He took a beat between his words, trying to hold his composure.

“This team is uh … ”

“Something that uh … ”

“I’m just glad to be part of.”

This moment hurt for Maye, who also revealed to reporters that he received a pain-killer injection in his right shoulder before Sunday’s game. The emotions were understandable. There are many ways to lose a Super Bowl. And New England’s 29-13 defeat to the Seattle Seahawks was not remotely pretty. The offense was suffocated, overwhelmed and often bullied. The defense, while stout much of the night, couldn’t carry the load alone. And the magical season — which saw New England go from last place in the AFC East in 2024 to this Super Bowl stage — felt like it was fighting off a closing curtain at halftime, despite facing only a 9-0 deficit.

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It was the kind of loss that sets the offseason in motion with the burden of knowing the roster, coaching staff and personnel department all have an uphill hike ahead. The kind of journey where you have to work hard and smart to anchor the franchise to this 2025 success, lest it become a cautionary tale of arriving too early with an overall team that is still too fragile to establish consistency into 2026 and beyond. The Washington Commanders were that kind of franchise in 2024, storming into the NFC championship game with rookie quarterback Jayden Daniels and a roster that was nowhere ready to backstop elite success in the event of health issues at the quarterback spot. And when that quarterback spot went sideways in 2025, so did the feel-good story of 2024 Commanders.

That could be these Patriots. That’s why the next 307 days of head coach Mike Vrabel will matter as much as the previous 307 days.

The saving grace — once the hurt of Sunday’s loss subsides, if it ever really does — is that Maye is experiencing this defeat at 23 years old and in his second year as an NFL starter. As historical quarterback continuums go, he resides in an impressive fraternity of Super Bowl starters who experienced this stage ahead of the curve, joining eight others who managed to play in a Super Bowl as NFL sophomores. Among them: Pro Football Hall of Famers Dan Marino and Kurt Warner; expected future Hall of Famers in Tom Brady, Ben Roethlisberger and Russell Wilson; still-in-motion starters Joe Burrow and Brock Purdy; and the lost career (or however you wish to view it) of Colin Kaepernick.

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That group is an interesting NFL mashup of success and failure sprawled across decades, showcasing that while some quarterbacks are destined for more Super Bowl opportunities — Brady, Warner, Roethlisberger and Wilson — others either never again stepped on the biggest stage (Marino and Kaepernick) or are still trying to find their way back (Burrow and Purdy). The direction of Maye? It now depends on both his own progression and the strides of virtually everything around him in the Patriots organization.

That thought should have represented the undercurrent in the minds of New England fans when Vrabel opened his Sunday night remarks intent on reminding everyone that all of this is just beginning.

Asked what he told his team after Sunday’s loss, Vrabel replied, “That I’m proud of everything they did. That I’m disappointed just like they are.”

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“I reminded them that we’re 307 days into what is hopefully a long, successful relationship and program,” Vrabel said. “And that it’s OK to be disappointed. We have to be disappointed and upset together. Like I always do, I [told] them I’m appreciative and thankful and grateful that I get to coach them. Part of our identity not being a frontrunner. Just like every year, somebody is going to lose this game and we have to remember what it feels like and make sure it’s not repeated.”

Of course, reaching another Super Bowl and making sure past mistakes aren’t repeated, is more than just remembering a feeling, especially when a franchise is still a significant work in progress. For all the well-built dynasty-era Patriots rosters that found consistent success like winding a clock each season, you have something different in this New England team that will spend this offseason trying to reconfigure a dozen components inside a Swiss watch containing 200 parts. There’s meticulous work ahead here. And even in the midst of Maye’s sudden rise to a near-MVP level in 2025, the raising of his ceiling has to be one of the cogs within it.

That includes all the euphoria of winning that accompanied the 14-3 regular season. And now it includes all the losing Sunday, a rebuke that delivers New England back to a 2026 starting line with little more than the stinging reminder of missed opportunity in the form of an AFC championship trophy.

It’s a haunting hurt that Maye seemed to understand clearly in defeat.

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“That’s what fuels you,” Maye said of the emotional low taken from the Seahawks loss. “I think that’s the biggest thing about life. It’s gonna have times like this. It’s how you bounce back. All the guys in that locker room are gonna use this as fuel. I’d go to war with those guys anytime, any day, anywhere. That’s motivation to get back here and not have this feeling. … I told those guys in the locker room, this is fuel. If it’s not, then I don’t know what this feeling can do for you, because this is tough.”

It’s fuel for the coaching staff, too. While the exact responsibilities for a litany of Super Bowl breakdowns will be unraveled over the next few hours, days and weeks, there’s little hiding that offensive coordinator Josh McDaniels didn’t have his best performance. Or that Seattle’s ability to disguise some pressure looks weren’t always recognized by Maye. Or that the offensive line — most especially left tackle Will Campbell — has an absolutely vital offseason ahead.

New England’s $35 million to $40 million in 2026 salary cap space — while an above-average margin — will have to be spent very wisely this offseason. The skill position pieces around Maye (most especially at wide receiver) will require a lot of attention. His line will need additions, and possibly even some reshuffling. The defense will require depth and extensions, most notably with cornerback Christian Gonzalez. And the well of 11 draft picks will have to produce some players capable of stepping in and having an impact as rookies.

For any franchise, that’s a lot of work. For a team that just lost in the Super Bowl, it’s a surprising amount of heavy earth that still has to be moved. But there’s also one significant step forward that appears to finally be out of the way: Even in a postseason when he accounted for only six touchdowns against four interceptions, seven fumbles and was sacked 21 times — even when he made several costly mistakes in the biggest game of his life — New England’s quarterback sounded resolute in the desolation of his first title shot.

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“There’s plays I’ll think about for the next probably seven months, until we’re back in September playing the first one [of the season],” Maye said Sunday night. “That’s the nature of it.”

On some days, in the absolute biggest game, so is losing. And Maye didn’t know that a year ago.