FLORHAM PARK, N.J. -- Ray Mickens was only a few yards away from The Hit That Changed the NFL.
"Man, it was a thump," Mickens recalled Thursday.
The thumper was New York Jets linebacker Mo Lewis, and the thumpee was New England Patriots quarterback Drew Bledsoe. It happened 15 years ago Friday -- Sept. 23, 2001 -- and ... well, you know the deal.
Out went Bledsoe, in came a gangly kid from Michigan, Tom Brady. The Jets won the game 10-3, but the Patriots won the season (a Super Bowl championship), the decade (two more titles) and the era (a total of four Super Bowl titles -- so far).
Look, I get it, this isn't a joyous memory for Jets fans, but an anniversary is an anniversary. Truth is, Brady was closing the gap on Bledsoe and would've replaced him at some point; Lewis simply accelerated it with a hit that nearly killed Bledsoe. He left the locker room on a gurney, his chest filling with blood because of a sheared vessel. I was there; I saw them load Bledsoe into an ambulance after the game.
"It wasn't a helmet-to-helmet hit, it was body-to-body," Mickens said. "There's a difference between them. You can hear the difference. This was a loud thump. I remember Drew wasn't getting up and I remember celebrating with Mo."
They weren't celebrating Bledsoe's injury -- they had no idea he was badly hurt -- but rather the hit. It was vicious, but clean, stopping Bledsoe 2 yards shy of a first down on a third-and-10 scramble. He actually returned for the next possession before yielding to Brady, who played the final series of the game.
No one knew it at the time, but it was the birth of a dynasty.
"We were playing to win the game, we weren't playing for years into the future," said Mickens, the reliable former nickelback.
It has spawned one of the great what-if questions in NFL history: What if Lewis hadn't wiped out Bledsoe on that postcard New England afternoon?
"If you want to go there," Mickens said, "why not ask, 'How'd we let [Bill] Belichick get out of New York?'"
That's a story for another day.
