Summing up the Super Bowl 51 loss with one player comment and one picture

This isn’t something any of us want to hear right now, considering how badly Falcons fans are hurting, but everyone from Arthur Blank down to Josh Perkins is hurting like hell after that game. This is the kind of crushing, defining loss that either inspires greatness in its wake or sinks a team’s fortunes in the short-term. As much as I’d love to hop in a damn time machine and find out how good the Falcons are going to be next year, we’ll have to wait.

In the meantime, I wanted to share one comment that really affected me, because I think it illustrates how seriously this team takes this loss, and how much it will hopefully inspire them to seek greatness a year from now. The second thing I’m sharing because, well, you’ll see.

I said earlier tonight that this sort of summarized exactly how I felt, and I suspect how many of you felt. We’re Falcons fans, so we’re accustomed to losing, and often losing in the worst possible way. For Ricardo Allen, who was playing in his first playoffs and certainly first Super Bowl, this was almost stunningly cruel.

Allen will be back next year, and for what it’s worth, he doesn’t seem like the kind of guy to wilt because of a loss like this.

Of course. Somehow, of course. On a night where the Falcons blew the biggest lead in Super Bowl history and lost in the NFL’s only overtime Super Bowl, coaches got stuck without an elevator. There is nothing more poetic, more Falconly, than this.