The Dolphins’ hopes looked to be all but over when they got the ball back trailing 33-28 with 16 seconds left.
But chaos then ensued as Kenny Stills caught a pass from Ryan Tannehill before pitching it to DeVante Parker, who then in turn passed to running back Kenyan Drake.
Drake burst through a gap in the Patriots’ scattered defense before rounding Gronkowski and surging into the endzone to complete a play already known as the Miami Miracle and leave the Patriots devastated.
Gronkowski stumbled in his unsuccessful attempts to tackle Drake and told a post-game media conference: “We’ve practiced that play a few times for the Hail Mary, you guys have seen it before, just go up and get the ball.
“They changed it up a little bit and I did sucky. You’ve got to be ready for anything, it’s football, the way it ended, it sucked.
“[I have] never really been a part of anything like that, [I] feel like it’s going to test our character big time, how we bounce back from something like that, just got to make that tackle.
“I did trip a little bit but that’s football, that’s why they say it’s a game of inches, game of a split second here and there, that just gave me a lesson that it shows that’s true.”
Asked for the reasoning as to why star tight end Gronkowski was on the field with the defense, head coach Bill Belichick said: “Well, they could throw it deeper [where Gronkowski was positioned to knock the ball down].
“They could have run the Desperado-type play, which is kind of an in between 20-yard pass, then it turned into a Desperado.
“There’s a lot of things we could have done better. It came down to one play but there were a lot of things besides that. In the end we’ve just got to do a better job than we did. Miami played hard like they always do, they just made one more play than we did.”
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