ATLANTA — Patriots defensive backs and twins Devin and Jason McCourty both have a lot on their minds as they prepare for Sunday’s Super Bowl matchup with the Rams.

Jason is thinking about the past and the magnets their mother, Phyllis Harrell, collected and used to post various keepsakes on the refrigerator of their childhood home in Nyack, New York.

Jason and Devin, the eldest twin by 27 minutes, were about 12 years old and playing in the Valley Cottage Pop Warner league together.

Everything went on the fridge, from school report cards to their football schedule. It was a way for Phyllis to celebrate her youngest sons after their father, Calvin McCourty, died following an asthma attack when they were 3 years old and with their older brother, Larry White, in the military fighting in the Gulf War.

“After each game we’d write how many touchdowns we had in the game and I remember after that season we finished with the same exact touchdowns,” Jason recalled. “I just remember practicing Pop Warner was fun. ... We’d wake up early on game days and we’d go outside before games and we’d go over all the plays and we’d throw the ball to each other.”

Nineteen years later, they will again be tossing the ball around before a game. Only this time they’ll be preparing to make history as the first set of twins to play on the same team in a Super Bowl.

For Jason it is a moment he calls “surreal” after spending the first nine years of his NFL career never experiencing a playoff game. He nearly got there a few times during his eight-year stint in Tennessee, then went through “a lot of suffering” last season as a member of Cleveland’s 0-16 team.