What happened in the Patriots comeback win over the Bills? Simple. They had their leader back, and he seemed to make a difference down the stretch.

“Well, anytime you have a guy like Tom (quarterback Brady) and uh, I think that the reporters here locally don’t really get to see after practice when the defense beats us up or we beat the defense up and it’s really something in the locker room that only we know what it is,” wide receiver Randy Moss said. “And it’s something we go through every day, so we beat up on the defense, and the defense beats up on the offense, you know.

“The quarterback is out there to move the ball, distribute the ball down the field and we did that tonight…”

But Moss knows Brady is something special. Monday he was 39-of-53 for 378 yards and two TDs, in his 29th career comeback win.

“I think it was 5:32 left in the game and you see Tom coming off the sideline and he comes in the huddle talking about ‘We’re gonna win this game.’ And when you have a guy like that saying positive things and then going out there to make it hapen, you have to have your hopes high and really think positive…

“I think that over Tom’s career, he’s been coached very well here.”

But Brady certainly found a great way to celebrate his comeback, didn’t he?

“I’m glad it’s over,” he said. “I’m glad we’re moving on and I’m glad we got a win. You know, we’ll take it.”

The ‘Aw Shucks” mentality always seems to work for Brady, who is great at deflecting questions about himself and turning the “I” into “We”. He was asked if the win was a building process for him after the long layoff.

“I thinkit is, not only for me, but for all of us,” he said. “We’ve all got to improve, we’ve all got tomake better plays. You can’t leave it up to chance like that. There are just way too many things that if, had we not made them, we would have lost.”

But they didn’t because the Patriots have Tom Brady, and the Bills had, well, Trent Edwards.

End of story.

– TOM KING