NEW ORLEANS - It's too early to say whether Super Bowl XLVII is the greatest big game of them all. It's not too early to say that this was the craziest. There were more jaw dropping, "what the heck just happened?" moments in this game than any we can remember. If this Super Bowl was the final act of a movie, we'd criticize it for being too unbelievable. But it all happened Sunday night in the Superdome.
The Baltimore Ravens survived a frenzied comeback by the San Francisco 49ers following a 34-minute delay in the third quarter for a power outage Sunday night, winning their second championship 34-31. Super Bowl MVP Joe Flacco threw three first-half touchdown passes, Jacoby Jones ran back the second-half kickoff a record 108 yards for a score, and star linebacker Ray Lewis ' last play fittingly was part of a defensive effort that saved the victory. As parts of the stadium went to black in the opening moments of the second half, the worst nightmare for the Baltimore contingent was that the Ravens could lose momentum at the exact point they were on the cusp of delivering a knockout blow in the Super Bowl, and taking away the ending this back-from-the-brink season deserved. But Joe Flacco knew, even when a three-plus touchdown lead had evaporated and he was in agony on the sideline watching his defense be picked apart in the final minutes. “I think it’s fitting we won that way,” the MVP of Super Bowl XLVII said.
"To me, that was one of the most amazing goal-line stands I've ever been a part of in my career"
With these Ravens, it was the only way.
A rout wouldn’t have been right. It ended the only way it should have, with a rickety old linebacker in his last game, running on fumes, his stunned defense trying to stop a dreaming kid from playing Montana-to-Clark in the back of the Superdome end zone. Fourth and the Lombardi trophy from the 5-yard line — all or nothing, just like this go-long-or-go-home ride the past six weeks. “I was sitting there thinking there’s no way, there’s no way we stop them here,” Flacco said. “But we did. I don’t think there’s any better ending to a career than that — a goal-line stand by one of the greatest linebackers and one of the greatest players to ever play the game.”
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This was how it needed to end: Chykie Brown making snow angels in the confetti, waving his arms as if he were flying through the roof of the Superdome, rejoining his teammates in the center of the field, the podium brought out and the hardware implausibly — no, impossibly — the property of the Baltimore Ravens. No one who saw this team in December saw this night coming, this surreal victory over another favored team in the most bizarre Super Bowl anyone but the Ravens could imagine.
In hindsight, they needed the lights to go out, the momentum to shift, their mojo to disappear, their legs to tire, their middle linebacker to look as old as time. A blowout — it was 28-6 after Jacoby Jones’s 108-yard kickoff return to begin the second half — would not have been fitting. Not for this team, this year. Not for linebacker Ray Lewis or safety Ed Reed. Not for Flacco or Jim Caldwell, who was installed as offensive coordinator in December. Not for wide receiver Torrey Smith or any of Coach John Harbaugh’s players.
Fourth-and-5 for the Lombardi Trophy — and they stopped the kid and a team about to ruin their dream. They cleared the final hurdle in the most impressive journey a champion has ever had to take. The rout, a win by blowout, would not have felt as right. They needed the theater, someone to tell them they couldn’t right before they did. Said Reed, smiling big,
“After everything we’ve been through, it was the only way it could end.”
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