So that makes it an even dozen.

A 10-7 win over the Denver Broncos in the AFC championship game on Sunday earned the New England Patriots their 12th trip to the Super Bowl. The Patriots will face the Seattle Seahawks in Super Bowl LX on Feb. 8 at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California.

At the risk of hubris, many of those Super Bowls felt matter of fact. Yeah, of course the Patriots are playing in the Super Bowl. They have coach Bill Belichick, quarterback Tom Brady, and a rotating cast of supporting players who are at the pinnacle of their careers. It was assumed the Patriots would be one of the top contenders in the AFC. It was OK to book a hotel room in the Super Bowl city in the fall, months before the game was played.

This season hit differently, though. The only assumption any rational fan could dare make in September was that the team would show improvement, coming off back-to-back four-win seasons, with a new head coach in Mike Vrabel, the third head coach in as many seasons. For a team that was paragon of stability for two decades, three coaches in as many seasons was an uncomfortable new reality.

Improving this much this quickly can’t ever be expected. Progress in the NFL is often measured an inch an hour. It rarely moves at this speed. That makes this Super Bowl one of the few in Patriots history that comes as an honest to goodness surprise. It joins 1985 and 2001 on that list.

I thought of adding the 1996 team, since that run to the Super Bowl also followed a losing season. But with coach Bill Parcells and a young Drew Bledsoe under center, that team came with expectations that it could pull it together. That team was less a “didn’t see that coming” and more of an “it’s about time.”

The 1985 team came on the heels of three straight seasons of choreographed averageness in which the Patriots were a combined two games over .500. Tony Eason got hurt, Steve Grogan and his neck roll came off the bench and played well. The team got hot, and stayed hot after an injury to Grogan led to Eason’s return.

The ’85 Pats won three playoff games on the road, winning the AFC championship in Miami, which is something the team had never done. New England entered the Orange Bowl that Sunday afternoon with 18 straight losses there. They walked out with a shocking 31-14 win.

For a few hours that January afternoon, we allowed ourselves to believe Eason would be a serviceable NFL quarterback. He wasn’t asked to take the team on his shoulders, but he didn’t play like the tackling dummy with a pulse he’d become later in his career. Eason completed 10 of 12 passes for 71 yards and three touchdowns while a dominant running game ate clock and the Pats defense forced six turnovers.

The good times went splat against the Chicago Bears in New Orleans, but the less said about that, the better.

By 2001, the Patriots had slid out of the mundane mediocrity of the Pete Carroll Era and into full-on Belichick rebuild. The 2000 season was a 5-11 reset, and 2001 looked like more of the same until Bledsoe took Mo Lewis’ best shot, which butterfly-effected the Tom Brady Era into existence.

Even as the Pats started to string together wins and Brady showed he might have the goods, a Super Bowl wasn’t a given. The Pittsburgh Steelers loomed as AFC favorites, and beyond them, the St. Louis Rams were playing offense like a video game.

Bledsoe got a deserved proper sendoff by playing well in relief of the injured Brady in the win at Pittsburgh in the AFC title game. Leading the game-winning drive in the final minute of the Super Bowl, Tom Brady became TOM BRADY, and no amount of winning he engineered could be considered a surprise ever again.

Are we on the cusp of a long run of Drake Maye and Vrabel-fueled success? Or is this lightning in a bottle, a one-season confluence of luck, talent and timing?

Does it matter? The Patriots are in the Super Bowl. Enjoy the surprise.