Long after the last reporter left, hours after the defense had forlornly gotten dressed and rode off into the darkening skies, Brian Poole still sat at his locker. He might have been a statue, cloaked in the evening shadows, were it not for his slow and regretful blinking.
Poole knew it was not his fault the Falcons had lost this game. You could hardly hang all 43 points on him, after all. He knew that the new, oddly hollow-eyed version of Matt Ryan had caught metaphorical fire (and smelled, strangely, of sulphur), but the defense had let the team down.