The visitor's locker room was a quiet, somber scene after Saturday's season-ending loss to the Patriots.
Players mostly talked with hushed voices as they packed their bags to head home to Baltimore following the 35-31 divisional-round defeat at Gillette Stadium.
"There are no such things as moral* *victories in the NFL, but we fought," wide receiver Torrey Smith said. "They just made one more play than we did."
The game was a back-and-forth contest as the Ravens had 14-point leads in each half, but the Patriots erased both of those leads and came all the way back to end Baltimore's season for the second time in the last four years.
"It's definitely disappointing, but I'm proud of the guys," defensive tackle Haloti Ngata said. "I felt like we were the better team today, but they did a better job of finishing."
"At the end of the day, they just made one more play than we did," running back Justin Forsett added. "That's what it usually comes down to."
The Ravens came into Saturday's contest as heavy underdogs to the top-seeded Patriots, but still nearly came away with another upset in Foxborough.
"It was a great game, but there's nothing as a Baltimore Raven to be disappointed about in this game," veteran wide receiver Steve Smith Sr. said. "I'm not disappointed by any means. We battled our tails off. At the end of the day, the scoreboard tells what it is, and you let the scoreboard speak for itself."
The toll of Saturday's loss was evident in Smith's face as he spoke to reporters, but the veteran receiver said that he "absolutely" walks away from his first season in Baltimore feeling good about what the team accomplished.
"There's nothing we did out there that would say otherwise," he said.
Several other players echoed that sentiment.
The Ravens came remarkably close to advancing to their third AFC championship game in four years despite dealing with significant adversity all season. The organization went through the Ray Rice controversy at the beginning of the year, and the team also had to overcome on-field issues stemming from 19 players landing on injured reserve.
"The way we were together as a team through a bunch of different types of adversity, we stuck together through it all," Torrey Smith said. "We came up short. It's frustrating. We worked our tails off and we believed in ourselves all year long. It's tough for it to end like this, but it wasn't meant to be."
The Ravens now head into an offseason with plenty of questions and issues to address, just like every year. But they have a nucleus of the team still intact, and that core gave the Ravens optimism heading into next season.
"Hopefully we can get a lot of these guys back next year," Ngata said. "We have a young team and I'm excited what we can do in the future."
