Driving toward their common goal with an uncommon selflessness, the Patriots beat the Chargers to stand a victory away from the perfect NFL season

The message of unity is transmitted from Belichick through longtime Pats such as Bruschi (54) to the uninitiated newcomers. David Bergman/SI

The locker room slowly emptied on Sunday evening, and the clusters of media thinnned. The New England Patriots had beaten the San Diego Chargers 21-12 to earn a place in Super Bowl XLII, and now equipment managers emerged from a laundry room and began hanging gear from the metal hooks in players' dressing cubicles: numbered (but nameless) white jerseys with blue pants for the offense, blue jerseys with gray pants for the defense. Mesh bags with socks and undergarments for everyone.

"For practice?" a writer asked.

"Yup," said one of the equipment guys. "Practice this week."

Here was a small act measuring greatness. There will be practice this week in Foxborough because it is nearly the end of January and the Patriots play on, writing history with each passing game. They will face the New York Giants on Feb. 3 in Arizona, seeking their fourth Super Bowl title in seven years and trying to become the first team in NFL history to go 19-0. A long ride is nearly over. "The next team meeting," said veteran linebacker Tedy Bruschi, "is about Super Bowl tickets and our families and how we're getting to Arizona. And that's always a fun meeting."

The Pats have been center stage since before Labor Day; their every game has been hyped as the next step to immortality, to which they've answered with the mantra It's a one-game season. "No other method would work," says New England linebacker Mike Vrabel, an 11-year NFL veteran. "So we do it this way." They shrugged off the blowback from the Week 1 Spygate controversy and averaged more than 40 points a game in the first half of the season, prompting accusations that coach Bill Belichick was needlessly running up scores on defenseless opponents and suggesting that a perfect record and fourth title for the franchise were foregone conclusions to be judged only subjectively, like beauty pageants.

However, five of the Patriots' last eight victories -- three of six down the stretch in the regular season and both of their playoff wins -- have hung in the balance into the fourth quarter. They narrowly averted upset losses to the Philadelphia Eagles and the Baltimore Ravens just after Thanksgiving and preserved their unbeaten regular season only by scoring 22 consecutive points to overtake the Giants on Dec. 29 in New Jersey. In the divisional playoff round they pulled away from a halftime tie for a 31-20 victory over a Jacksonville Jaguars team whose exceptional game plan was executed to near perfection.

And then in the AFC Championship Game, even with injuries hobbling quarterback Philip Rivers and tight end Antonio Gates and limiting running back LaDainian Tomlinson to two carries and one pass reception before he left the game, the Chargers ignored the memo declaring that they were too beat up to be competitive. They intercepted Tom Brady three times (one more than his total number of incompletions in the Jacksonville game, when he went 26 for 28) and trailed only 14-12 early in the fourth quarter.

These are not the Patriots of October. While the public fixated on 19-0, New England remade itself into a resourceful outfit that has won with guile and toughness. Over the last two weeks Randy Moss, who set an NFL regular-season record with 23 touchdown receptions, has caught two passes for 32 yards, but second-year running back Laurence Maroney has rushed for 122 yards in each game.

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