NEW ORLEANS — This was how it needed to end: Chykie Brown making snow angels in the confetti, waving his arms as if he were flying through the roof of the Superdome, rejoining his teammates in the center of the field, the podium brought out and the hardware implausibly — no, impossibly — the property of the Baltimore Ravens.
No one who saw this team in December saw this night coming, this surreal victory over another favored team in the most bizarre Super Bowl anyone but the Ravens could imagine.
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Adversity’s Adults 34, the San Francisco 49ers 31.
In hindsight, they needed the lights to go out, the momentum to shift, their mojo to disappear, their legs to tire, their middle linebacker to look as old as time. A rout — it was 28-6 after Jacoby Jones’s 108-yard kickoff return to begin the second half — would not have been fitting.
Not for this team, this year. Not for linebacker Ray Lewis or safety Ed Reed. Not for Joe Flacco, the game’s MVP, or Jim Caldwell, who was installed as offensive coordinator in December. Not for wide receiver Torrey Smith or any of Coach John Harbaugh’s players.
It ended the only way it should have, with a rickety old defense running on fumes, trying to stop a dreaming kid from playing Montana-to-Clark in the back of the Superdome end zone, Colin Kaepernick rolling right, throwing for the lead.
Fourth-and-the Lombardi Trophy from the 5-yard line — all or nothing.
And the Ravens stopped him, stopped the 49ers from the most stirring comeback in the annals of the Super Bowl, and Baltimore has everything it wanted.
The trophy; Flacco as cool as could be, headed for Disney World; Lewis, going out a victor on the last night of his incomparable career; Smith, who lost his brother in a motorcycle accident earlier this season, bear-hugging his offensive coordinator, the only African American calling plays in an 67-percent black NFL at the time he was elevated to that position, plays that shredded one of the best defenses in football. The man who didn’t get so much as an interview for a head-coaching job was living proof of the sham Rooney Rule.
And Harbaugh, a victory over his younger brother, yes, but more so the resolve that characterized the past year.
“Baltimore, thanks for sticking with us,” an exasperated John Harbaugh said about 45 minutes after it ended. “Thanks for believing in us. We did this together. The final series of Ray Lewis’s career was a goal-line stand for the Lombardi Trophy. It wasn’t perfect. It wasn’t pretty. But it was us.”
They needed to be counted out. That’s been their mantra. The team that lost four of its last five regular season games and eked into the playoffs with an underwhelming quarterback directing a vanilla offense was supposed to be too old on defense and too predictable on offense to do much after their heartbreaking loss to New England in last year’s AFC championship game.
They entered the postseason a longer shot than the Washington Redskins to win the grail, and after disposing of Indianapolis in the first round it was pretty much decided that Lewis’s last game would be in Denver.
