Remember on Friday that I pointed out that the NFL regular season and the postseason are not the same thing.

If last Packer season didn’t prove that, Sunday’s 37–20 NFC second-round loss to the New York Giants did. All the Packers’ 15–1 regular season did was get them a number-one seed for what turned out to be a one-game postseason.

The irony is that the Packers’ much maligned defense, with the egregious exception at the end of the first half and the fourth quarter, didn’t play that badly. The defense forced three Giant field goals instead of touchdowns and two turnovers. Eli Manning’s last touchdown pass in the best postseason game of his career came right after Ryan Grant’s fumble.

Sunday’s problem was the one thing that had been excellent all season — the offense. Quarterback Aaron Rodgers looked as if he hadn’t played in three weeks, missing receivers with whom he would have connected in the regular season. The team that finished second in the regular season in turnover ratio committed three turnovers. The Packer offense played as if the football was made of molten lava, with eight dropped passes. As New Orleans (five turnovers) showed Saturday, you cannot turn the ball over and expect to win in the postseason.

As Packer fans recall after the Giants’ last postseason win at Lambeau Field, playoff losses suck because a return playoff trip does not necessarily follow. (Recall that half of the 2010 playoff teams did not appear in the 2011 playoffs.) As the financial types say, past performance does not necessarily predict future results. The chemistry of this year’s team won’t be the same next year, just because things change. Players get better or worse or leave, and assistant coaches leave to  improve their own careers, and their replacements are not guaranteed to be improvements.

And so, as defined by my wife, winter begins. (And no, Miss Wisconsin’s winning Miss America is not better than winning a Super Bowl.) However, things could be worse: You could be a fan of Da Bears or the (headed-to-Los-Angeles?) Vikings.