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INDIANAPOLIS – He's a player that defines what Jim Irsay was talking about late on Sunday night in Foxborough.
Toughness.
It's a word that has been associated with the sport since its infant stages.
It's a compliment coaches reserve for the rarest of players.
It describes Ahmad Bradshaw.
For the second straight year, Bradshaw's season was cut short. But not after he gave the Colts offense a dimension they would eventually not be able to replace.
"It changed obviously because what we had going there especially in that five-game winning streak, we felt like we had a good one-two punch going there," Chuck Pagano said of the Bradshaw/Trent Richardson combination that ended in Week 11.
"(Bradshaw) coming in off the bench and from the bullpen, so to speak, getting yards, creating yards on the ground, all that he did in the pass game, the touchdown production that he gave us before he went out with the injury; it definitely changed."
While the Colts offense clearly felt the loss of Bradshaw, the running back himself was without his true passion following the fibula injury on November 16.
How Bradshaw left the field after his fractured fibula is a scene that indicates the type of player he has been in his eight NFL seasons.
Bradshaw was injured near the goal line at the opposite end of the field from the home tunnel.
Instead of taking help from trainers, or even a golf cart ride to the Colts locker room, Bradshaw made the 100 plus yard trek with the thought in his head he had been fearing.
"This was an injury I was always scared of and thinking about during the season, just something to stay away from as successful as the games were coming," Bradshaw, who finished 2014 with 725 total yards and eight touchdowns in his 10 games played, said earlier this week.
"I love this game so much. It's always tough to watch just knowing how good our team was when I went down, just made it that much tougher."
Bradshaw is now two months removed from the injury. He spent the first six weeks in a cast.
He's been in a walking boot for the last two weeks and will spend the rest of January in the boot.
As a free agent once again in 2015, Bradshaw's playing future is TBD.
Bradshaw was almost a forgotten free agent during last year's offseason.
The Colts did not forget though and, now, Bradshaw is hoping they won't again.
"We'll see. That's the beauty of this game, you never know," Bradshaw says of his pending free agency.
"I would love to be here and stay with the Colts, and play for this organization, which we make a better step every year. Like I said, I would like to be here to keep going."
