The clock runs out

The GOAT is headed to pasture. For good this time, he says. A well-deserved, comfortable pasture. It’s a title earned, GOAT, even to those fans who never much cheered for No. 12 in Patriots blue or Bucs red. But this is Tom Brady we’re talking about. And like it or not, his has been the football career of all time.

Mr. Brady capped his first professional losing season in grim fashion, his 8-9 but-still-divisional-champ Tampa

Bay Buccaneers soundly beaten at home in the first round of the NFL playoffs.

No. 12’s retirement should come as no surprise. And no one realistically expected a battered Tampa Bay squad to make a playoff run. But many half-expected a minirun from the GOAT. Maybe not a deep one, but a run devoid of whimper, nonetheless.

After all, the man hadn’t suffered a losing record as a starter throughout 21 NFL seasons.

Ten Super Bowl appearances, seven wins. The stuff of GOATs.

Mr. Brady holds almost every major record for quarterbacks: most career passing yards, most career completions, most career touchdown passes, most games started, most QB career wins, most QB regular-season wins, most Super Bowl MVP awards.

He is the only quarterback in NFL history to win a Super Bowl in three different decades, the only one to be named Super Bowl MVP for two different teams. His Pro Bowl selections are the most of any player and he was the very first unanimous NFL Most Valuable Player.

All that, and we’re not done. At age 40, Brady was the oldest NFL MVP; at 43, the oldest Super Bowl MVP; the oldest to throw a playoff TD; and at 44, became the oldest Pro Bowl quarterback ever. He also is the only QB named to two NFL all-decade teams (the 2000s and 2010s) and was unanimously chosen for the league’s 100th anniversary alltime team in 2019.

As a starter, his teams failed to make the playoffs just once. In 23 years. His 20 seasons as the leader in Foxboro for the Patriots is another record for a QB.

In hindsight, No. 12 should’ve taken his cue three years ago after leading the Bucs to a win in Super Bowl 55. Most of us would’ve been satisfied with walking into the sunset into a lucrative broadcasting deal with Fox. And all those records and MVPs and championships safe and sound in the books.

We remember a scrappy “game manager” Michigan QB evading Quinton Caver, Ryan Hale and a host of other Hogs to convert crucial third and longs and help the Wolverines stave off Houston Nutt’s Razorbacks in the 1999 Citrus Bowl in Orlando.

Seemed like another round of “hard luck Hogs” at the time, but Michigan’s quarterback simply made big play after big play. And few in the stands that gray day suspected they were watching the future “greatest” play his final college game.

Football replaced baseball as America’s sport long ago. Romantics pining for the days of DeMaggio and Mays — when less was more and baseball as described on the radio was pure poetry in motion — may not want to admit it. But numbers don’t lie.

The gridiron offers its own sonnets, however, and No. 12 authored many of them. The GOAT is leading himself to pasture, a well-deserved, comfortable pasture. The game will go on — a new round of outstanding field generals is establishing itself as the future of the game.

The game will endure, all right, but it’ll never be quite the same.