How do you get ahold of a TagModel in a template?
I figured this one out right after I posted it. 

{% set blogTag = craft.tags({ tag: tag, group: 'blogTags' }).first() %}


One mistake was searching for it with "name" instead of "tag". 

The other mistake was that I needed to call first() to get the TagModel. Otherwise, craft.tags() just returns an ElementCriteriaModel.