Their New Year’s Day wasn’t Jan. 1. It was Sept. 9 in Seattle. Young Maye and the Patriots are learning that success in the NFL isn’t static, despite how elementary their Foxborough forebears, led by Tom Brady and Bill Belichick, made it look. It must be re-engineered and re-earned every season. These aren’t feel-good NFL up-and-comers any longer. They’re a team with high expectations and a target on their collective back.
“Yeah, it is tough in this league. It is tough. We want to execute and be successful on offense, and we still know that that was not our best football [even] when you come out with a win,” said Maye.
“So, you have got to … see it both ways. You have got to be excited and enjoy the win. But at the same time, you realize that playing like this is not going to end up with, offensively, us leading our team to wins. I think that is what it starts with, and it starts with me and starts with more juice.”
In a meeting of the only two franchises to capture six Lombardi Trophies, there wasn’t much juice. Vrabel’s defense squeezed the life out of contact-averse quarterback/aging icon Aaron Rodgers, limiting him to 187 yards passing, a 59 percent completion percentage (23 of 39), and a 60.5 quarterback rating.
Rodgers looked every bit of his 42 years on this Earth on a strip-sack by Christian Barmore that broke the game open early in the fourth quarter. Elijah Ponder scooped up the fumble and rumbled 19 yards for a comfortable 20-3 advantage.
Prime Rodgers would not have blinked at such a deficit, but this advanced version of the iconoclastic four-time MVP is simply in self-preservation mode in his sendoff season. The final indignity was the Patriots ending his consecutive passes without an interception streak at 310 in the fourth quarter on a juggled ball.
Rodgers departed with a bruised ego. Meanwhile, the ultimate soldiers of good fortune last year had lousy injury luck in a Pyrrhic victory, including losing longest-tenured Patriot Mike Onwenu to a serious ankle injury.
Rodgers and Maye are quarterbacks at opposite ends of the career spectrum. But coming off an MVP runner-up season, Maye has started slowly in Year 3, with just one touchdown pass and four interceptions — halfway to his 17-game regular season total in his breakout sophomore season.
Something looks amiss with New England’s newest coverboy QB.
Maye (14 of 22 for 208 yards with an interception) assumed more of a play-it-safe posture coming off his disastrous three-interception fourth quarter vs. Seattle.
He was a Bible Belt conservative in the first half as the Patriots took a 10-3 halftime lead. On the first play of the second quarter, Maye slid down like a playoff-bound Red Sox player and surrendered on third and goal from the Pittsburgh 10, eager to preserve the chip-shot field goal.
He looked more gun-shy than gunslinger.
And on the first possession of the second half, after the Patriots drove to the Pittsburgh 33, the turnover bug bit again. Maye sailed a football that belonged in a water fountain with a penny attached, because it was more wish than pass, into a passel of Steelers. It was easily intercepted at the Pittsburgh 10. That gave Maye turnovers in five of his last six games, dating to last year’s playoff run, and a league-high 39 in his 35 games as a starter.
“I mean, the guy made a good play. We didn’t make a very good one,” said Vrabel. “Those things are going to end up costing us. But I love the way that we responded defensively, and we see how critical the football is, who possesses it, and how you finish drives.”
The Patriots, who finished second in the NFL in points per game (28.8) last year, failed to finish. Seven of their 11 drives pierced Pittsburgh territory, but they scored just one offensive touchdown — a 39-yard, first-quarter romp by TreVeyon Henderson, making his season debut.
“I think [we’re] figuring us as an offense out early in the [season],” said Maye. “And, when you are playing against teams early … you’re figuring out what we got, kind of who we are.”
What the Patriots should’ve figured out by now is that last year’s magic carpet ride is over. While the belief might carry over, the results do not.
Christopher L. Gasper is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at christopher.gasper@globe.com. Follow him @cgasper and on Instagram @cgaspersports.