For those who lived through both, the takeaway from last night's final scene of the Red Sox collapse was: it was pretty bad, but it was no 1986.

Bullshit, says Nate Silver, the New York Times political stats guru who is warming up for the 2012 elections by crunching some painful baseball numbers.

"It’s hard to describe just how epic the Red Sox’ collapse was — something on the order of [Bill] Buckner’s play multiplied by itself two or three times over," he writes in this definitive, stomach-turning analysis of the Sox epic fail

The New York Times's 5th Down Blog has done the math, and it turns out that the Patriots had a better chance to win the game by going for it on 4th and 2 from their own 28 than they would have if they'd punted:

With 2:00 left and the Colts with only one timeout, a successful conversion wins the game for all practical purposes.