Tom Brady (Image via Getty Images)
They added Randy Moss and Wes Welker, and Brady threw 50 touchdown passes, a league record at the time. New England won every regular-season game and every playoff game until Super Bowl XLII, where the Giants beat them 17-14 on February 3, 2008. By 2020, the Bradys had changed the whole map. At 42, Brady left New England for Tampa Bay, moved the household to Florida and won Super Bowl LV in his first season there. Brady first retired on February 1, 2022, then reversed course 40 days later. In August he stepped away from Buccaneers camp for 11 days, citing personal matters. His divorce from Bündchen was finalized in October 2022. The Bucs finished the regular season 8-9 and lost to the Cowboys 31-14 in the wild-card round on January 16, 2023. Tom Brady made it official in a short video on February 1, 2023, exactly one year after his first attempt. He left with 89,214 passing yards and 649 touchdown passes in the regular season, along with five Super Bowl MVP awards. At 45, he handed it back to the three people who had watched every version of him, the winner and the loser, and who still had a vote in how his story ended.
Brady has often said that losing was the thing that bothered him most. This time, he said, it was for good. On the field, the Patriots were building something odd and brilliant. Children offer no such script. A teammate can be coached and a defense can be studied, but a seven-year-old watching from the stands is simply waiting to see how you handle a bad day. Now picture losing while your own kids watch, and then having to drive them home. That is the part of his story that gets overlooked. The nerves most players describe come from strangers, from the idea of failing in public. Brady’s version came from the opposite direction. The people who mattered most were the ones who would remember his mood after the game, not the score. Cameras forget fast. Kids do not. That win is the cleanest proof of his age-defying skill, but it also came with a hidden cost. Every extra year in the league meant another year of missed school events, birthday dinners and quiet weekends. The strain showed. It was a flat, honest ending for a man who had rarely allowed one. His final season was far from his best, but it was enough to prove he could still play. That may be the quiet point of his exit. For two decades, his calendar belonged to the NFL.
