ATLANTA -- It's official: The 2017 Atlanta Falcons are no longer a study in human psychology. No matter what happens over the next 14 games and beyond, their successes and failures will be about football and only football, and not about the things that haunt men in the dead of night.
The Falcons will take the most staggering Super Bowl collapse ever to their graves, that much is guaranteed. They will never need to inspect the 283 diamonds in New England's latest championship rings to see their 28-3 Super Bowl LI lead over the Patriots frozen in big scoreboard lights, only to be reduced to a punch line in cocktail parties from Connecticut to Maine.
But on Sunday night, when the Falcons opened their shiny new stadium with a reenactment of their NFC Championship Game beatdown of the Green Bay Packers, they declared themselves a liberated lot. This was Atlanta's first prime-time appearance before the country since treating its fans to the mother of all meltdowns in Super Bowl LI. It appears the Falcons won't have to worry again about 28-3 until they're holding a considerable lead in Super Bowl LII in Minneapolis.
They sure look strong enough after two weeks, mentally and physically, to make that trip. The Packers opened Sunday's 34-23 defeat without their two starting tackles and quickly added Jordy Nelson and Mike Daniels to the injury list -- but hey, that isn't Atlanta's problem. If Aaron Rodgers ends up performing another one-man traveling show, so be it. Matt Ryan, reigning league MVP, has already suffered enough postseason trauma to worry about another former MVP who already owns a ring.
"I don't think about it too much," Ryan maintained Sunday night. "I think everybody else does because the question keeps coming up." The quarterback referenced the work his team did in the offseason, and their season-opening victory over the Chicago Bears.
"We tried to answer it that way," he said, "but it kind of seems like nobody believed you when you were saying it. It's felt that way in our building for sure. Were we disappointed in it? Absolutely, but we got past that. We started working on trying to become the best 2017 football team we could be. We're two games into it. Mission accomplished on those first two games."
Make no mistake: The Falcons wanted this one, badly, and for reasons that transcended the grand opening of Mercedes-Benz Stadium. Outside the winners' locker room, Falcons owner Arthur Blank wrapped his coach, Dan Quinn, in a full-throttle embrace. Theirs was a January and February hug, not a September hug.
"It was a great night for the city and for the fans and especially for Mr. Blank," Quinn said.
The coach and his players had talked confidently all offseason about putting Tom Brady's miracle comeback behind them. What else were they going to say, anyway? They had to convince themselves it was over and done with before they could convince anyone else.
In the immediate wake of the collapse, Ryan forced himself to watch the tape of the Super Bowl three times. It hurt more than Dont'a Hightower's sack and strip. But it's always better to confront championship-round disasters head on, just as the 2013 San Antonio Spurs did after they blew Game 6 (and ultimately the series) with Miami Heat fans in the parking lots and arena officials preparing for the visitors' coronation.
The Spurs secured vengeance against the Heat the following June, and it's quite possible the Falcons will even the score with the Patriots in February. It's also possible they'll end up like the 2011 Texas Rangers, who twice stood one strike away from winning the World Series in Game 6 before the St. Louis Cardinals stole it in seven. The Rangers haven't won a playoff series since.
The early returns in Atlanta are more promising than that, and some changes in scenery and personnel have undoubtedly helped. This new building couldn't have opened at a better time. With its retractable roof and giant, sky-high videoboards forming a halo, the stadium helped change the conversation. On opening night, the place looked so spectacular it made Jerry Jones' palatial home of AT&T Stadium look like the StubHub Center.
The presence of two new coordinators hasn't hurt, either. Marquand Manual is running a defense that appears improved, and necessarily so, and Steve Sarkisian has assumed the role of Kyle Shanahan, who pulled a Pete Carroll (he passed the ball in the Super Bowl when he should've run it) and left NRG Stadium in Houston with a whole lot of explaining to do. Shanahan is now the 0-2 head coach of the San Francisco 49ers, who line up Brian Hoyer at quarterback (99 passing yards vs. Seattle on Sunday) and an offense that has so far delivered four Robbie Gould field goals and no touchdowns.
Shanahan was Atlanta's undisputed Super Bowl LI bogeyman, and as good as he generally was at running the offense, his subtraction represented a psychological addition. In Seattle, Richard Sherman and others still have apparent issues with Carroll and offensive coordinator Darrell Bevell over their decision to have Russell Wilson throw the ball rather than Marshawn Lynch rumble it over the goal line. But the Falcons don't have residual issues with Shanahan because they don't have to look at him anymore.
So there they were Sunday night, a new team with a new outlook in a new building carrying a 34-10 lead into the fourth quarter. Devonta Freeman, who whiffed on the Hightower block that changed everything in Houston back in February, scored two touchdowns. Julio Jones, who made the absurd catch that should've beaten New England, caught four balls for 95 yards in the first half. Ryan, who had a quarterback rating of 144.1 against the Patriots, threw for 201 of his 252 yards in the first half and ended up beating Rodgers for the third time in 11 months.
Desmond Trufant intercepted Rodgers and scooped up a Rodgers' fumble and returned it for a touchdown after Vic Beasley Jr. nearly cut the Packers quarterback in half. The Atlanta defense needed to deliver this kind of performance as much as it needed to protect the remains of a 10-point fourth-quarter lead in the opener in Chicago, where Brooks Reed sacked Mike Glennon in the final seconds on fourth-and-goal.
"In the past, we haven't won a lot of those games on the defensive side," Falcons general manager Thomas Dimitroff said. "It was usually the offense pulling it out."
In the middle of a delirious locker room -- by mid-September standards -- Dimitroff stopped for a moment to say that he was proud of the resilience of his team "even when things went awry a little bit," and that he's seeing the growth needed on both sides of the ball. "It's the second game of the season," the GM said, "but it's a nice start for us to set a nice tone and show that we're not looking back on anything, that we've been looking forward."
The view looks pretty good from here. The Falcons own the Packers. The Dallas Cowboys were humiliated in Denver. The Seattle Seahawks have been shaky and the New York Giants have been more than shaky. In other words, Atlanta appears to be the early team to beat in the NFC.
They were also the early team to beat in Super Bowl LI, with a better than 99 percent chance to win when they held a 25-point lead in the third quarter. But they lost. The painful memories will last a lot longer than the rest of their NFL careers, but the Falcons deserve credit for the way they have managed the nightmare.
Now they're 2-0, and they just smacked around Rodgers on muscle memory. That doesn't mean they'll return to the Super Bowl. But it does mean whatever happens between now and then will be about blocking and tackling their opponents, and not about exorcising ghosts.