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http://www.charlotte.com/mld/charlotte/sports/football/13531699.htm
New England trailed late in Sunday's football game here as it lined up for a point-after-touchdown. Something was odd - and it wasn't just that the champs were headed for a rare defeat at home. See, Patriots players were down there grinning behind their facemasks. Yucking and joshing. All but giggling.
"Their offensive line was kind of giddy," Dolphins end Vonnie Holliday said. "One of them was saying, `Wait'll you see this!' ''
It was a moment later that the Pats let local hero Doug Flutie take a curtain call on his long pro career by drop-kicking the extra point.
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Meantime, don't kid yourself that a full game of Brady and others Sunday would not have underlined the Pats' continuing clear edge over Miami, whose victory requires a mental asterisk.
New England's cavalier nonchalance about the result could not have been conveyed more clearly short of players' wives suiting up and taking the field.
I mean, a drop kick!?
One of those last happened in an NFL game in 1941. (Wasn't that the year Flutie was born?) Sunday's was the first in the league ever televised.
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Ricky Williams, asked about the rare, throwback play, said, "What's the big deal?" Told it hadn't happened in 64 years, he chided reporters: "Are you guys that bored?"
The existentialist running back then called our interest in the drop kick weird.
Being called weird by Ricky Williams is an interesting sensation. It's a little like being called fat by a 640-pound man.
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Soon, he will be studying advanced yoga again in India, by the way.
Which might be weird to some.
But still not as weird as a drop kick.