Tom Brady's retirement marks loss of constant, passage of time

By Charlotte Wilder
FOX Sports Columnist

When I first heard rumblings that Tom Brady was retiring from the NFL after 22 seasons, I was sitting in a rental car outside Arrowhead Stadium the day before the AFC Championship in Kansas City, Missouri. 

I was parked in an empty lot that, a day later, would be filled with cornhole boards, grills, trucks, tents and people about to watch their beloved quarterback compete for a trip to the Super Bowl.

Much like I, a Patriots fan, did for 20 years of my life as Brady took New England to new heights and demolished the dreams of opposing NFL teams and fan bases.

I am embarrassed to admit this, but I started tearing up in my borrowed Nissan Rogue. I was not expecting to become emotional. It felt very silly to well up over one guy’s decision to stop doing his job, especially when that job was throwing a football.

But my job is to consume sports for a living and then tell other people about them. I love it because sports are, at their core, deeply emotional experiences. Watching a game is one of the few instances — besides a funeral, wedding or Beyoncé concert — where it’s socially acceptable to cry, yell or laugh maniacally. 

It’s fun to invest your emotions in something that doesn’t have any actual effect on your daily life (unless you bet on games, I suppose). It’s a rush to feel your heartbeat increase with the tension as the game nears its end. It’s a strange release to hitch your mood to something you can’t control. 

But sometimes it’s more Pavlovian. When I see a highlight of Tom Brady in a Patriots jersey — which he has not worn for two years now — I am dragged back through time. I board a mental train that whips me past two decades of myself. 

We speed by games I reported on at age 30, 29, 28, 27. We revisit my early 20s and the Boston bars where I hung out, then roll into my late teens. We finally chug by ages 16 through 12 and come to a stop at 11 in 2001, when Brady won his first Super Bowl.

For better or worse, I can map the major events of my life by the Patriots’ seasons. I remember watching the team win with my cousins in fifth grade in Massachusetts. I remember going to Super Bowl parties in high school. I remember the guys who wore Brady jerseys to class at my New England college because they hadn’t yet discovered menswear blogs or seriously dated a woman.

Many Patriots fans feel this way. Brady played football for so long that he was one of the few constants of the past 22 years. Do you realize how much has changed in two decades? 

I’m not going to do the whole "'Hanging By A Moment' by Lifehouse was the No. 1 song in 2001" thing (though it was), but when Brady won the Patriots their first Super Bowl, we had just finished worrying that all the computers would explode when the new millennium started and the date turned to double zeroes. I didn’t have an AIM screen name yet, and fax machines still seemed useful. I had only recently outgrown my habit of destroying cassette tapes for fun.

Brady became the comforting background noise of New England — and the whole country, really, though the rest of America definitely enjoyed it less. And even when he went to the Buccaneers, at least he was still playing. Dad might’ve left, but we still could catch glimpses of him. He defied time. 

And that’s really why I got emotional about Brady’s retirement. Time has passed, the world feels more fraught than it ever has, and nostalgia is a hell of a drug. But I was also in my feelings because of what Brady has meant to me personally, aside from the joy he gave me as a player for the team I love.

I didn’t always cover sports. I started my journalism career at a food magazine and then went to work for Boston.com, an arm of The Boston Globe. I was there when the Patriots won yet another Super Bowl, and it was then that I realized sports were a space in which I could joke around and have a personality. 

I also realized that so many people — who often had nothing in common with one another — were invested in the team they loved. Stories on the Patriots and the Red Sox were consistently the most read articles on a general interest site. You could write about anything through the lens of sports, and people would read it. 

The Patriots were such a dominant storyline for so many years that my New England upbringing gave me a head start when I made the jump to sports full-time. Bryan Curtis at The Ringer once wrote about the people in sports media who launched their careers on the backs of the Patriots, and he was gracious enough to include me. I had never thought about it that way before, but ever since, I’ve felt a kind of gratitude toward Brady. 

So as I stared at the Chiefs’ stadium, I realized that the man hanging up his cleats was a huge part of the reason I was sitting in a rental car in a deserted parking lot in the first place. The outpouring of support from athletes Brady played with or against over the past 22 years made it clear that a lot of people felt the same way about him. 

Brady is a famously dedicated teammate, one who did whatever it took to win and always looked out for the people around him. I wrote about his team-first mentality on Tuesday, but all you had to do was watch him turn the mic over to his teammates after he won his seventh Super Bowl to understand that this is a man who made it so far because he understands the value of others.

I haven’t always covered Brady with glowing praise. But I have always tried to be fair. And the fairest thing I can say about Brady is pretty simple: He is the greatest quarterback of all time. He has seven rings, and he proved that he didn’t need Belichick to win them when he went to the Bucs. He also became more fun without the Patriot Way of "keep your head down, do your job, and whatever you do, don’t smile" holding him back.

But most importantly, watching him play was like watching a master composer write a piece of music. Brady moved with the grace of someone who has studied and dissected every joint and muscle in his body. He read opposing defenses with such speed that he knew what they were going to do before many of them did. When I covered his second-to-last game a few weeks ago, Brady threw the ball in an average of 2.17 seconds. 

That was the fastest average by a quarterback in any game this season. 

Brady is 44 years old, and he is retiring at the height of his abilities. That inspires some sense of awe no matter what you think of him as a person. It also makes me sad because it seems very unfair. I once profiled former defensive end Chris Long, who won a Super Bowl with Brady in 2017 and another against him with the Eagles a year later. I asked Long if he was scared of what playing football would do to his body, and he said no. He said what really scared him was "the void."

"Something I worry about more than that is the void that football will leave when I’m done playing," he said. "You’ve been doing something your whole life, and then it’s over. You’re approaching your middle age. My friends back home have settled in. When I stop playing, I’m going to be the one who’s like, ‘I don’t know what the hell I’m doing.’"

Long has done just fine in his retirement, building a career as a commentator and podcast host. The void isn’t going to be a problem for Brady, either, in terms of keeping busy. He has his family and many businesses, and I’m sure he’ll dive into even more.

But there is something a little heartbreaking about the fact that sports eventually let athletes down. Their bodies can’t take the wear and tear forever. There is no other career or art that you can master that deserts you the same way. Hell, even the Rolling Stones are still releasing music. 

Which is why there have been rumors that Brady would retire for the past six or seven years now, and every previous report was wrong. For one to finally be right felt like a glitch in the matrix. 

It made it difficult to not contemplate the march of time and my own mortality. But it was also a lovely way to remember great moments from the past 22 years. Either way, as I stared at Arrowhead, I was forced to pause and comprehend that the man who has played football for two-thirds of my life is going to stop. 

A day later, the Chiefs lost. Patrick Mahomes was not channeling Tom Brady as he failed to score a touchdown in the second half. Joe Burrow, at the age of 25, did his best Brady impression by overcoming an 18-point deficit to give the Bengals a shot at their first Super Bowl victory.

So perhaps the moral of the story is that the music always comes back on, and someone else shows up to be the next constant. But we don’t get younger. And there’s something inherently moving about that reminder, as obvious as it is.

Even if all it takes to spark the feeling is one man telling us he’s finished throwing a football.

Charlotte Wilder is a general columnist and cohost of "The People's Sports Podcast" for FOX Sports. She's honored to represent the constantly neglected Boston area in sports media, loves talking to sports fans about their feelings and is happiest eating a hotdog in a ballpark or nachos in a stadium. Follow her on Twitter @TheWilderThings.