Quitchercryin’. Buck up, bite your bottom lip and say it with me: The better

team won.

Please put down your weapons. I don’t mean the Denver Broncos are the superior franchise throughout the entire course of human events. Your New England Patriots are still the Team Of This Decade. Jake Plummer still isn’t worthy to carry Tom Brady’s designer man-purse.

I’m just saying that Saturday night’s AFC Divisional Playoff ended precisely the way any objective onlooker expected. Given all the ingredients of this game and this game only (on the road against a team that loses at home once every leap year, using 45 different starters in 17 games, having failed to beat anyone worth a dang since that steel cage Texas Death Match in Pittsburgh), everything signaled a decisive Denver victory.

The idea that any member of the mediocrity-loving national media picked the Patriots to pull the upset proves that they finally dipped into our Kool-Aid supply. Thanks for coming around, guys. Your insincerity is inspiring.

Look, it was only last week that Willie McGinest, channeling the always charismatic coach Bill Belichick, wowed us with that ancient proverb, “If you live in the past, you get a ferocious beat-down in the present.”

Something like that. Anyway, we should have been listening. Nothing that unfolded in the real world since the second week of September favored the Patriots in this game.

All the fuss was about those 10 consecutive playoff victories and the absence of Corey Dillon, Kevin Faulk and Tedy Bruschi in that deceptively close, 28-20 regular-season loss in the Mile High City. Or that bizarre, come-from-behind Monday Night Football victory in Denver a couple years back. Most of the new converts failed to mention that Brady’s counterpart in that game was the legendary Danny Kanell.

We subscribed to the myth that the intangibles and the injuries made the Patriots something greater than a 10-win team that clinched the NFL’s second-worst division with two weeks to spare. We bought the argument that the happy-footed Plummer and the lack of a marquee runner made the Broncos something less than a 13-win team that ran the table in the league’s toughest bracket.

We conveniently forgot, to paraphrase an infamous Rick Pitino meltdown, that Rodney Harrison, Matt Light and Ty Law weren’t going to be walking through that tunnel.

Yes, the better team won. And please, let’s pour another glass of that bitter drink, walk in lockstep with our leader, handle the indignity with class and not whine. Because whine is what we New England sports fans typically do, en masse, until we are the laughingstock of talk radio nation.

Before the embarrassment of riches that is the Belichick and Brady Era, whining was our birthright, and we did it splendidly. We whined when Russ Francis got mugged. We whined when Ken Stabler didn’t. We whined when Steve Grogan didn’t start Super Bowl XX, as if two weeks of preparation would have reversed that five-touchdown margin of defeat.

Maintaining our decorum will take a measure of faith and more than a little acting ability, since Saturday night’s multiple open-handed slaps from fate are conducive to whining.

You could make the case that the Broncos’ first 17 points were a gift. An obscenely late and unwarranted pass interference flag against Asante Samuel. A false start on Jason Elam’s 50-yard field goal that somehow went undetected. Ben Watson’s best impersonation of Ben Johnson, without the performance-enhancing drugs, that should have been rewarded with a touchback.

Points given. But if those plot twists were a gift, the Patriots did the wrapping. New England gave those moonlighting strangers in stripes the opportunity to deal them a down-and-dirty by turning over the ball five times.

And does anybody remember Joe Montana getting knocked into the next millennium by the Giants’ Jim Burt in a 49-3 debacle two decades ago? Even the great ones are entitled to a Tony Eason-like performance once in a while, and Brady had one Saturday night, overthrowing open receivers like a high school quarterback who imbibed too much energy drink.

The cameras captured the Patriots in too many un-Patriot-like poses. Samuel threatening to break Kyle Turley’s world record in the helmet toss. McGinest ordering Larry Izzo to leggo his Eggo. Ellis Hobbs looking like somebody kidnapped his puppy.

There’s really no reason for despondency here. New England and Indianapolis will be the odds-on favorites to win Super Bowl XLI by the time they get to training camp. The quarterback and coach are still first-ballot Hall of Famers. Hobbs, Logan Mankins and Nick Kaczur will have a year’s separation from their rookie baptism by fire.

In each of those 10 straight playoff triumphs (and yes, I’m including their breakthrough win over the marshmallow-soft St. Louis Rams), the Patriots were the better team.

This time, they weren’t. And there’s no shame in that. So toughen up, enjoy the rest of the playoffs, congratulate the winners, and rest well in the knowledge that there is no way they will even sniff what the Patriots have accomplished.

Kalle Oakes is a staff writer. He can be reached by e-mail at [email protected].