Last modified: Saturday, September 6, 2008 2:36 AM EDT Randy Moss kneels on the field after being unable to come up with a catch in the final minute of the fourth quarter of Super Bowl XLII. Suppressed memories BY MARK FARINELLA SUN CHRONICLE STAFF FOXBORO - Rodney Harrison says he does not lay awake at night, wondering what more he could have done to knock the ball off David Tyree's helmet. Jarvis Green doesn't give a second thought, he says, to having Eli Manning in his grasp and then letting him go. If Tom Brady is having nightmares about the onrushing defensive line of the New York Giants, neither he nor galpal Gisele Bündchen is telling anyone. And if Asante Samuel is feeling remorse over the pass along the sidelines that he should have intercepted and didn't, the millions of dollars he received from the Philadelphia Eagles have probably eased his pain. The Patriots have moved on, they say - moved on from being at the brink of sports immortality, then crashing to a horribly painful reality when they could not stop an inferior team from scoring upon them in the last 2:42 of play left in the 2007 season. Sure they have. Never in the eight previous seasons of Bill Belichick's stewardship has the core of his philosophy been as severely tested as it will be this year, the year after the Patriots choked in Super Bowl XLII. If that term sounds harsh to you, then it's time for a reality check. A team does not win 18 straight games, many of them by ridiculously large margins, and put more than 40 new scoring and offensive-statistics records in the books, and then fail miserably in the biggest game of the year - arguably, the only one of the 19 that really mattered - without having their failure classified as one of the all-time greatest chokes in the history of U.S. professional sports, if not sports the world over. The Patriots could have been the best of all time. They still hold a No. 1 ranking after their 17-14 loss to the Giants in Glendale, Ariz., but it's not a ranking they or anyone else would want. They blew it, and it hurts like hell - probably privately for them, much more publicly for the many fans who still can't bring themselves to watch a replay of the game. Thus comes into play the Belichickian philosophy that, once a season ends, no matter what the outcome and no matter what level of success has been achieved, all teams revert to 0-0 and the Patriots can rightfully claim to having achieved nothing. Call it "moving on," call it "humble pie," call it whatever you want - it's the rule of the road in Foxboro. But can it still work in the wake of everything that happened in 2007, including the "Spygate" scandal that cost Belichick $500,000 for overseeing the illegal videotaping of opposing teams' coaching signals, the franchise another $250,000 and its good name from one end of the country to the other, and also resulted in the forfeiture of one of its two 2008 first-round draft picks? That is just one factor gnawing away at the foundation of the New Millennium's only NFL dynasty. Time is already weakening the mortar that holds The Dynasty together. There are just two offensive starters and three defensive starters remaining on the 2008 Patriots who played in Super Bowl XXXVI, the first blow struck in this dynastic period. There are just three offensive starters (four when injured guard Stephen Neal returns to the roster at midseason) and five defensive starters remaining from Super Bowl XXXIX, played just 31/2 years ago. And, there is a disturbing historical trend that awaits the loser of a Super Bowl. Of the last seven teams to fall victim in the championship game, only one, the 2006 Seattle Seahawks, returned to the playoffs the next season. They got to the second round of the NFL tournament before bowing out. Extend that premise over the last 20 seasons, and the results are still not very encouraging to those who believe these Patriots will steamroll their way through the AFC and advance to Tampa in February, preordained to bring home a fourth Lombardi Trophy. Of those 20 Super Bowl losers, 11 failed to make the playoffs the next year. Three were ousted in the first round, three were eliminated in the second round, and three Buffalo Bills teams advanced to the Super Bowl following losses, and lost all of them. No team during those 20 years lost a Super Bowl one year and came back to win it the next. Nine of the losers finished with sub-.500 records, and another two finished at 8-8. The odds, as they say in Vegas, are against them - and therein awaits the biggest test to Belichick's core philosophy in not only his Patriot tenure, but his entire career as a coach. There is serious doubt that Belichick has the team to reverse those curses. The unusually high amount of roster tweaking he's done in the first week of the regular season may indicate that even he knows he doesn't have the team with the firepower or defensive prowess of the 2007 Patriots. He may not need it. In many ways, the 2007 Patriots were overkill. Their gaudy offensive records proved insufficient when an opposing team relentlessly sent its fast and powerful pass-rushers through a battered offensive line and after a gimpy-footed quarterback in an all-or-nothing fashion for 60 minutes. They grew old and tired defensively before New England's eyes over the last six regular season games, and didn't have enough left in the tank to play three minutes of football worthy of the stakes at the end of the season. Some steps have been made to shore up the weaknesses. But unlike 2007, when Belichick created the football equivalent of the "Dream Team" on offense in the previous offseason, many of this year's moves involve raw rookies who may be more legitimately considered part of a transitional phase instead of instant solutions. Offensively, the unit remains essentially intact. Brady (50 TD passes in 2007) still has Randy Moss (league-record 23 TD receptions) and Wes Welker (league-leading 112 receptions) as his primary targets. Laurence Maroney is still the lead back, Kevin Faulk is still around to lend third-down reliability (after he returns from a one-game suspension), and the depth has been shored up with the addition of former Raider LaMont Jordan to a backfield that already has Sammy Martin and Heath Evans in place. The offensive line is also 80 percent intact, with only Neal missing as he continues to heal from offseason knee surgery. But this unit was severely challenged by the Giants in the Super Bowl, and the fear is that copycats will try to exploit the weaknesses that were exposed in the biggest game of the year. The largest concerns are depth in the receiving corps beyond Jabar Gaffney, depth and ability among the reserve linemen, and the durability of tight ends David Thomas and Benjamin Watson. Defensively, the Patriots need for Richard Seymour to return to the form he displayed before a series of nagging injuries undermined his dominance of the line of scrimmage over the past two years. Green, Vince Wilfork and Ty Warren return intact, but they need to get more pressure on opposing quarterbacks. The linebacking corps' advancing age was arrested a little with the addition of rookies Jerod Mayo (who is likely to start inside), Shawn Crable and Gary Guyton. But the greybeards (Mike Vrabel, Tedy Bruschi) remain in place for the time being, and Adalius Thomas is moving outside to replace the departed Roosevelt Colvin, hopefully getting back in touch with the pass-rushing skills that made him such a threat in Baltimore. The secondary remains a huge concern. Harrison's coverage skills are starting to come into question, but he and James Sanders still constitute a hard-hitting safety tandem and second-year veteran Brandon Meriweather shows promise. Cornerback, however, is another question, or series of questions. Will Ellis Hobbs be recovered fully from two offseason surgeries and be an improved cover corner as well? With the Fernando Bryant experiment having failed through four preseason games, is the replacement for Samuel to be found among veteran Lewis Sanders or rookies Terrence Wheatley and Jonathan Wilhite? Or is ex-Bronco and ex-Bengal Deltha O'Neal the answer? Has anyone seen Ty Law, and is he 10 years younger? Kicker Stephen Gostkowski had a solid camp, making most people forget the vote of no confidence he received from Belichick in the Super Bowl. Chris Hanson may not be secure as the punter, as auditions have been a regular occurrence in the first week. And as for returns, newcomers C.J. Jones and Matthew Slater may be able to give Welker a break. All the while, each of the 53 Patriots will respond when asked that they have moved on from the past, that they're only looking ahead to the next opponent, that the season is just a 17-week series of one-game seasons, and that nothing that happened on the floor of University of Phoenix Stadium on Feb. 3 really matters. The operative word so far has been "finish" - finish preparation and leave no stone unturned, finish plays and compete at a high level from beginning to end, finish games with same intensity and strength as when they began. And, of course, to finish what was started when Eli Manning, and not Tom Brady, was holding the Vince Lombardi Trophy aloft. But first, they have to start - 1 p.m. Sunday at Gillette Stadium, against the Kansas City Chiefs. MARK FARINELLA may be reached at 508-236-0315 or via e-mail at mfarinel@thesunchronicle.com. Read Farinella's blog, "Blogging Fearlessly," at thesunchronicle.com/farinella.