With regard to Atlanta's playcalling in the fourth quarter, the Falcons have played a lot of fourth quarters with big leads this season and been criticized for vanilla playcalling that has let their opponents back into games in which they should have been dead and buried. So today, with the Patriots defense clearly starting to dominate the line of scrimmage, they tried to play their normal offense and got badly burned. (Not having Coleman - the bigger, short-yardage back - available didn't help.) If they had done line plunges on second and third down on their final possession with the lead, every Falcons fan would have been thinking "Gary Anderson" as Bryant came out for the would-be clinching kick. So I think the decision-making was excusable.
(I did also warn that Quinn's clock management naivete was a potential Achilles heel for the Falcons, and we just saw that to some extent - e.g., clocking the ball on second down right at the end of the game was poor, as was not calling one or more defensive timeouts in overtime to try and slow the Patriots down and give their defense more time to rest.)
As for what this means to me as an Atlanta fan - particularly an Atlanta fan who was studying abroad in 1995-96 and never felt the Braves World Series win was my own - there's a real chance that this will fundamentally alter my relationship with sports forever. I'm sure Red Sox fans felt this way after 1986...but then, the Celtics had just crushed the Rockets in the NBA Finals a few months earlier, right? This just feels horrendous: the Braves are years away from relevance, the Hawks are violently stuck in the middle, and the NFL is too random to take anything for granted. (And the Flames and Thrashers are both in west-central Canada.) I don't begrudge any of you your joy after what just happened. But my disappointment is so crushing - too crushing to get to sleep, so I'm now in the middle of the worst all-nighter ever - that I really do wonder why I should bother with this whole sports malarkey. Surely no hypothetical, by-no-means-assured future joy can be worth this.