A certain piece published in this space last week about New England’s need to toughen up and return to its old-school roots went over about as well as Martha Coakley’s Senate campaign.

Local football fans, it seems, are rather attached to the entertaining, offensively prolific but very soft Patriots of recent vintage.

It’s a very unusual turn of events: like the Bay State’s rebuke of its traditional leftist values on Tuesday, Patriots fans have cast aside the football values they once held near and dear.

It was just a few years ago that New England football fans valued tough, hard-nosed football and mocked the soft, losing, late-season efforts of teams like the Colts. Patriots fans once valued gritty wins in January and mocked the Colts every time they collapsed in the winter. Patriots fans once enjoyed winning championships and mocked the Colts for failing to come through in the clutch.

Heck, it was something of an annual tradition for Patriots fans to clog up the IndyStar.com forums each January to make fun of defenseless Colts fan.

Not anymore: These days, the Colts are the old Patriots and the Patriots are the old Colts. The Colts are the team that guts out gritty wins in big games. The Patriots are the team that puts up big offensive stats in the regular season and then comes up empty when the games matter most. The Colts are the team playing for the conference title. The Patriots are the team that scored more points and dominated more second-rate regular-season opponents — but that went one-and-done in the playoffs.

The Colts are tough. The Patriots are soft. And Patriots fans, if last week was any indication, seem to have embraced the, ahem, “change.”

Indy’s 20-3 win over the Ravens Saturday night was symbolic of that change. Remember, 20-3 was the same score by which the Patriots beat the Colts in the 2004 divisional playoffs — a single performance that perhaps marked the height of the New England dynasty.

The Colts entered that game with one of the highest-scoring offenses in NFL history (522 points). It was a frightening offense led by Peyton Manning’s record 49 touchdown passes and his truly spectacular 121.1 passer rating (still the record).

The Patriots, meanwhile, entered the game with more flesh wounds than Monty Python’s Black Knight. The team’s best lineman, Richard Seymour, was out for the game. The team’s best defensive back, Ty Law, was out for the season. In fact, undrafted rookie Randall Gay started in place of Law.

(Gay might have been undrafted, but he was also tough. Last we checked, he was forcing postseason turnovers Saturday afternoon for a Saints team that fielded one of the best pass defenses in football this year and that plays for the right to go to the Super Bowl on Sunday; the soft Patriots can sit back and say, “Hey, I used to play with that guy!”)

Nobody in the national pigskin “punditry” thought the wounded Patriots had a chance to slow down one of the great offenses in history that evening.

But they did. In fact, the tough Patriots embarrassed the soft Colts. Indy was held to three points, nearly 30 points below its season average. It was the biggest offensive choke job by any team in the playoffs since Johnny Unitas and his prolific Colts were blanked by the Browns in the 1964 NFL title game. Or, put another way, the Patriots produced one of the greatest defensive efforts in 40 years of playoff football.

The New England offense, meanwhile, had zero in the way of receiving weapons. David Givens was the team’s leading receiver. He caught just 56 passes (half a year’s work for Wes Welker) for 874 yards (half a year’s work for Randy Moss).

But those Patriots were tough. Thanks largely to Corey Dillon and Tom “My Favorite Receiver is the Open One” Brady, they cranked out three monstrous scoring drives of 16, 15 and 15 plays and forcefully bent the Colts to their will. Brady completed 18 passes to 10 (count 'em, 10!) different receivers that night.

The following week, the Patriots and their receiving trio of Givens, Troy Brown and Deion Branch hung 41 points on Pittsburgh and the league’s No. 1 defense. They did it on the road in front of a frenzied crowd of Steelers fans, and they did it on a night in which the temperature hovered near zero. (Brady that evening completed just 14 passes — but seven different guys caught them.)

Tougher teams have rarely ever been seen.

That old-school style was defined by tough defense and a balanced offense orchestrated by football’s greatest playmaking quarterback — the guy who always seemed to find his favorite receiver, the open one, when it counted most late in the season and in the wintry football of January.

And it’s the performances of this guy, Tom Brady, that tell us that the Patriots have lost their way since they adopted the soft, pass-first and pass-often mentality that produces big regular-season numbers but little else.

Brady played 14 postseason games throwing to the likes of Brown, Givens, Branch, David Patten, Christian Fauria, Reche Caldwell, Patrick Pass, J.R. Redmond, Bethel Johnson and the rest of his veritable who’s who of journeyman backs and receivers. Here’s what Brady’s average effort looked like in those 14 games:

• 21-of-35, 60 percent, 230 yards, 6.6 YPA, 1.5 TDs, 0.6 INTs, 86.25 passer rating.

Brady has played four playoff games throwing to the likes of pass-catching phenoms Moss and Welker. Here’s what his average effort has looked like in those four games:

• 25-of-38, 66 percent, 223 yards, 5.9 YPA, 2 TDs, 1.5 INTs, 82.69 passer rating.

The numbers are fascinating. Brady always was accused of being a “dink-and-dunk” passer in his early, championship-winning years. But it’s been here in his stat-padding seasons of 2007 and 2009 — the years he’s been paired with the prolific tandem of Moss and Welker — that he’s truly evolved into a dink-and-dunk passer in the playoffs.

His attempts and his completion percentage have gone up with Welker and Moss, but his yards per game, yards per attempt and passer rating all have declined. He throws more touchdowns these days. But he throws way more interceptions. He’s not as careful with the ball. He makes more mistakes. He’s forcing the ball into coverage when he shouldn’t. And he’s proven less effective in the postseason, despite the superior weapons at his disposal.

More importantly, the Patriots averaged a very, very impressive 25.3 PPG in those first 14 postseason efforts — well above the team’s scoring average in the 2001-06 regular seasons. The Pats were a very impressive offensive force in the playoffs in their tough days.

In their soft days? The Patriots have averaged just 20.0 PPG in those four postseason efforts — far below the rate at which they scored in the regular season.

The 2007 Patriots will stand forever as the symbolic Stay Puft Marshmallow Man of pigskin: a big, old softy. They averaged 36.8 PPG in the regular season, the highest-scoring team in modern NFL history. They scored just 22.0 PPG in the playoffs, ending with their 14-point debacle in Super Bowl XLII.

That’s soft. And that’s not the type of team that Patriots fans once embraced. The type of team that Patriots fans once embraced is hosting the AFC title game this Sunday.