Courtland Sutton sat in his locker and stared at the ground.
Garett Bolles, still in uniform, embraced longtime equipment manager ‘Flip’ Valenti and looked for a moment like he might just keep hanging on.
The two longest-tenured Broncos players have seen seasons end in the Empower Field locker room before, but not like this.
Not one game from the Super Bowl.
Not four points shy.
Not so close they could almost feel the trip to California and the chance at a world championship.
“This one definitely carries some weight,” Sutton said.
There is a mural in the team’s locker room with a dramatic mountain scape and the two words: Head West.
The Broncos will not.
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“We weren’t able to get it done and it’s tough, especially in this game,” Sean Payton said, pausing momentarily with the blunt force of finality. “Especially in this game.”
In many ways, this game looked like so many the Broncos played this season.
Vance Joseph’s defense dominated, holding New England to one or zero first downs on 10 of its 12 full possessions and giving up a total of three points on the visitors’ two sustained drives.
They harassed quarterback Drake Maye, sacked him five times on 26 drop-backs and looked at times impenetrable.
The only touchdown they gave up came after a Jarrett Stidham fumble left the Patriots with just 12 yards to cover.
“Obviously, I can’t put our team in a bad position like that,” said Stidham, who threw for 133 yards, an early go-ahead touchdown to Courtland Sutton and a late interception to Patriots star corner Christian Gonzalez in his first start in more than two years.
In others, the final afternoon at Empower Field felt foreign. Sudden snow in the midst of this state’s most mild winter in recent history. The absence of quarterback Bo Nix, who authored so much magic and engineered so many game-defining drives before fracturing his ankle last week against Buffalo. The team that had won 12 straight one-score games this year, finding itself in the most familiar of hand-to-hand tussles, only to finally suffer the knockout blow rather than deliver it.
“It sucks,” inside linebacker Alex Singleton said. “I mean, that’s it. Those are the only words for it. It’s really miserable and it’s going to hurt for a long time.”
Mother Nature threw a white blanket on each team’s offense in the second half, a clear and cold morning turned clipper snowstorm of an afternoon in the span — literally — of a 13-minute halftime break.
Neither team could move the ball much once the snow picked up.
Marcus Jones (25) of the New England Patriots breaks up a pass intended for Lil'Jordan Humphrey (17) of the Denver Broncos during the fourth quarter of the Patriots’ 10-7 AFC Championship Game win at Empower Field at Mile High in Denver, Colorado on Sunday, Jan. 25, 2026. (Photo by AAron Ontiveroz/The Denver Post)Neither team could reliably kick the ball through the uprights, either. New England kicker Andres Borregales missed attempts from 63 just before the half and 46 in the third quarter, though he also managed to pop home a 23-yarder that stood as the final margin.
Broncos kicker Wil Lutz missed from 54 before the half and then, critically, a game-tying attempt from 46 with 2:13 remaining and Denver trailing 10-7.
The snow impacted that kick, too, not in Lutz’s ability to convert from that distance but the operation itself.
Lutz said afterward he thought he and punter Jeremy Crawshaw may have marked their spot to kick from incorrectly.
“You couldn’t see the lines on the field and honestly we might have been a yard short on the snap,” Lutz said. … “We had to kind of estimate.”
Practice squad defensive lineman Leonard Taylor III generated enough pressure to get a hand up and deflect the ball and Denver’s Super Bowl hopes onto a wayward trajectory.
In the end, Sunday’s loss started to percolate when the Broncos failed to do what they’d done so well for most of 19 games before. They missed chances to take advantage.
Over and over and over.
Leading 7-0 and facing fourth-and-1 from the New England 14-yard line, Payton kept his offense on the field rather than attempt a short field goal in the still docile weather. The play blew up immediately and Denver walked away with nothing.
The Broncos in total pushed the ball to the Patriots’ 36-yard line or deeper four times and came away with just seven points.
Payton thought the Broncos had momentum and field position advantages throughout the first half, but “we didn’t come away with enough,” he said.
Indeed, instead of a potential two-score lead, the Broncos led just 7-0 in the second quarter when Stidham made his biggest mistake of the game. Pressured on a manageable third-and-4, he retreated 20 yards then fumbled when he threw the ball backward in a last-ditch attempt to avoid a sack.
Two plays later: Tie game.
Denver’s offense failed to score on its final 10 possessions and generated just 32 yards and one first down after halftime.
Wil Lutz (3) of the Denver Broncos jogs off the field after missing a game-tying field goal during the fourth quarter of the New England Patriots’ 10-7 AFC Championship Game win at Empower Field at Mile High in Denver on Sunday, Jan. 25, 2026. (Photo by AAron Ontiveroz/The Denver Post)All of that, frustratingly, with the two offensive players best equipped to make plays in this kind of weather — Nix and running back J.K. Dobbins — sidelined by injury.
This loss will sting the Broncos for days, weeks and months to come. The club has been back to the playoffs the past two seasons under Payton and should be competitive for years to come, but opportunities like this one — bolstered by home-field advantage throughout the playoffs and Hall of Fame-type quarterbacks Patrick Mahomes, Lamar Jackson and Joe Burrow watching from home — do not come around often.
As the end of the season sinks in, so, too, will the what-ifs. What if Nix had not fractured his ankle? What if Payton had taken the three points? What if a fourth-and-1 sneak by Maye had been ruled short on the field during the Patriots’ go-ahead, third-quarter drive? What if Dobbins had made it back one week sooner? What if Lutz and Crawshaw could have seen the lines? What if safety Talanoa Hufanga comes up with an interception deep in Patriots territory on the first possession of the game?
“We had momentum,” Sutton said. “Scoring early was huge. If — if, we can sit here and play the ‘if’ game — if we maximize on that momentum, we’d have had them against the ropes. With the way the weather changed going into halftime, who knows what would have happened?
“I can sit here and play the ‘if’ game all day. We lost the game.”
That’s life in this country’s most popular, parity-driven sport. That’s life on the razor’s edge, all the sharper and all the more treacherous come late January.
Lil'Jordan Humphrey (17), Courtland Sutton (14) and Kris Abrams-Draine (31) of the Denver Broncos sit on the bench as the clock ticks down during the fourth quarter of the New England Patriots’ 10-7 AFC Championship Game win at Empower Field at Mile High in Denver on Sunday, Jan. 25, 2026. (Photo by AAron Ontiveroz/The Denver Post)Before Sunday, the Broncos had won 12 straight one-score games
They had won nine of 10 at Empower Field.
They engineered an 11-game winning streak in the middle of the season, came from behind to win over and over and looked poised to do it again Sunday with their backup quarterback.
It all looked so good until it didn’t.
It all looked like another bluebird day on the Front Range, with a ticket to the Super Bowl right there for the taking, until the wind and snow arrived and blew the Broncos into the offseason.
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