By Ron Borges, Globe Staff, 2/1/2002

EW ORLEANS - It's different this time for Lawyer Milloy. Last time, he wasn't experienced enough to understand the Super Bowl Experience. He was just a rookie who thought you play, you win, you go to the Super Bowl.

This visit, he knows better. Not coming back here for five years can do that for you.

It has been five long seasons since Milloy was in this position, five long years spent wondering whether he would ever get back to the Super Bowl to try to avenge the most distasteful loss of his career, the 35-21 defeat to the Green Bay Packers that ended his rookie season in despair in the same stadium where he will lead the Patriots against the Rams Sunday.

''It was easy my rookie year,'' Milloy said. ''I was along for the ride. I was standing next to Luther Vandross for the coin toss and all that, and it was great. When we lost it, I really didn't understand what we had lost until two weeks after it was gone.

''It really didn't hit me until the next year when we lost in the playoffs. I was like, `Hold on! We were supposed to be in the Super Bowl. What's going on?' That's the reality of it. With all of the parity and free agency each year, the makeup of the team changes, so you have to take advantage of your opportunity that year. There's no next year right now in the NFL.''

There's also no next week and no next game. Milloy's Patriots will take on a Rams team considered to be far their superior, a situation not unlike the one the Patriots faced in 1997 against the Packers and in 1986 against the Chicago Bears.

The Patriots have an odd history in these kind of games, dating back to 1963 when they were destroyed by the San Diego Chargers, 51-10, in the AFL championship game. In three appearances in their league's final game, they not only have lost all three times but by an average margin of 30 points (average score: 44-14). It is not a pretty picture.

So neither history nor expectations are on the side of Milloy and his teammates, but the leader of the Patriots' defense doesn't much concern himself with all that, because if he did, he would not be here in the first place. He would be where so many experts seem to want the Patriots. He'd be home watching someone else.

''We know no one respects us, but we control the respect thing,'' Milloy said. ''You could not respect us right now. The only way we're going to gain respect is to win.''

The Patriots have fought and scrapped their way to Super Bowl XXXVI. They deserve to be here because they did what no one else in the AFC could do. They survived a long season.

Yet the Rams are, to use Don King's vernacular of the ghetto, ''SKD'': They are somethin' kinda different. To beat them, you not only have to do something kind of different, you have to look at things kind of different.

''If they have the ball half the time, then we won't win the game,'' said Milloy, making a concession he normally would not make to any opponent. ''Their offense is very potent. It's the best in football. But if you want to be a champion, you have to be ready for that challenge. You respect the offense they have, but you leave that at the door.

''You just believe in yourself. When you have belief, it's overpowering. It's nothing anyone from the outside can understand, but it would make it more gratifying if we win to have done it against all the odds.''

The longest odds are not the 14-point spread but would seem to be that the league's 24th-ranked defense will be able to stay with an opponent far faster than they are at almost every position. When the teams met two months ago on a soggy field in Foxborough, the Rams did not have a good night offensively, yet still passed for 396 yards and won, 24-17, in part by taking the ball with 7:45 to play and doing one of the more remarkable things one could have imagined: keeping it until Kurt Warner had only to take a knee to end the game.

In other words, they didn't score with it. They didn't blitzkrieg the secondary, as they have done so often in recent years. They simply ground the Patriots' chances for victory to dust, an indignity Milloy has not forgotten since he was among those defenders unable to get the Rams' offense off the field when his team most needed it.

''We did not play a complete game,'' Milloy said. ''That's the bottom line. We fumbled just before halftime and then we let them go all the way down the field [97 yards in two minutes] and score a touchdown. That was a 14-point swing.

''Other than that, we really felt we controlled the game, but that team right there never gets flustered. Even when they were down, they were able to use the clock.

''They were on the road in a hostile environment. It was a night game. The field was wet and slow. But they were never worried about all of the elements. They just focused on their team and on what they needed to do to win the game.

''In order to beat them, we'll have to play a near-perfect game. We're the underdogs. We know that, but we're not worried about being labeled at all. We really believe in our team. We don't see the pointspread. We don't care about that.

''We started out 0-2 and nobody gave us a chance. People said it was a rebuilding year and we were right where they predicted us to be in the first place [which was last place at the time]. All we had at that point was us. So you can label us whatever you want. We believe in ourselves.''

That's good, because that is all Milloy and the Patriots will have to combat the highest-scoring offense in the NFL (and the third-stingiest defense): They'll have each other.

Lawyer Milloy, at least, will take his chances with that.