After all those ugly afternoons, when critics would ask Dungy for a bit more offense, like Oliver Twist asking for gruel, Dungy never quite seemed to grasp that this was what people wanted. Dungy always would bristle and respond as if people were asking him for 300-yard passing performances. But when you see a team function the way the Bucs did Monday night, you wonder why they have kept this offense on cement blocks all season. Yes, Tony, there are a lot of ways to win. But over the course of a season, a team needs to know it can win in a lot of different ways.
Offense is a way, too.
For most of the week, the talk about this game was about revenge. The word was used so often you would have thought the teams were doing a version of Hamlet. But for all the talk about the past and this game, the best thing you can hope for is that this was about the future. If this really was the shape of things to come, then the Bucs are going to be a handful in the coming playoffs. Monday night, a team finally discovered what offense was.