It’s weird what sticks with you. For me, it was a television segment during the summer of 2008. I’d just moved back to Massachusetts from Texas, and on the screen behind me was a picture of Tom Brady at the end of Super Bowl XLII, with a tagline that played off the title of a Buster Olney book on the Yankees reading, “The Last Night of the Patriot Dynasty?”
Brady was turning 31. The core around him—the group he grew up with and had won three Super Bowls and got to 18–0 with in 2007—had aged significantly. Bill Belichick was 55, and New England had started to bleed lieutenants, with scouts and coaches leaving for new opportunities elsewhere. So we were trying to see the future for the team, and the quarterback, and put in perspective the historic run we’d just witnessed.
What a joke that turned out to be.
