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SUPER BOWL XXXV

I'm going back to Tampa to play in the Super Bowl, a year after they ran me out of town. There's obviously the potential for a lot of distractions. I knew my body was broken down. I knew we hadn't played that well offensively the last few weeks of the regular season and the playoffs. But I knew if my mind was right, and made good decisions, played situational football, then that defense -- might be the greatest defense that ever played football -- would bring it home. So what I did during the week was I unplugged the TV, I never read a newspaper. I just kind of created this isolation mentality where I was going to do a lot of visualization. I went over the plays, situations, hundreds and hundreds of times knowing that the best thing I could do for the Baltimore Ravens was play an A-plus game from the neck up. I was so conscious of controlling my emotions, being in an environment that was potentially overwhelming, that I didn't have enough emotion going into the game. The first couple series, I wasn't my normal self, I was too melancholy. And I remember we're coming out of a TV timeout and it's the third series of the game and I'm kind of stepping away from the huddle, and here comes Sam Gash. Great fullback, great player, great teammate, and he's got this look in his eyes like he's angry at me. And Sam and I are really close, one of my closest friends on the team. And he lifts me up under my shoulder pads and starts shaking me and says, "We need your juice. We need your energy. Come on, what's going on?" And it was at that moment I realized that I had been so conscious of controlling my emotions that I wasn't allowing my emotions to help me or my team. And thank God for Sam, that he got me out of it. And that's actually the drive that I was lucky enough to hit [Brandon] Stokley on the touchdown. And, really, with that defense, that was all we needed. I probably had the saddest post-Super Bowl experience of any quarterback in this group. I missed out on the celebration with my teammates. We spent so much time on the podium and then our PR guy grabbed me and started doing the rounds with me and I thought that was the appropriate way of doing it, I was just following directions, and little did I know my entire team had gone into the locker room to celebrate, the ultimate celebration. Any kid out there, dreaming of the greatest postgame celebration -- it's got to be after the Super Bowl when you're in the locker room with your teammates, your brothers, and I missed the whole thing. When I get back to the locker room, they're already sweeping the locker room floor. Every locker is empty and it's just my locker with all my junk in it. And I just sat there and it was one of the loneliest moments of my life.
-- As told to Greg Garber of ESPN.com