Tom Brady Takes the High Road on the Foxboro Screw Job. Fortunately Not All His Teammates Did

There are different almost as many ways to deal with loss and disappointment as there are losses and disappointments. Emily Dickinson once famously wrote, “After great pain, a formal feeling comes.” (And since spent her life in her parents’ house in Amherst, MA writing poems about death that next to nobody ever read, she’s know.) Some like Dylan Thomas, prefer to “rage against the dying of the light.” Kubler-Ross has us starting at “shock and denial” and working our way through to “acceptance.” How you handle it is entirely your call. Your grief mileage may vary.

For instance, I’ve spent the night and morning since the Patriots got hosed by the officials in what would’ve been one of the great regular season wins in team history pretty much moping around in kind of a fugue state, sullen and downbeat. Like a Billie Eilish song made flesh.

WebMD is telling me I should seek immediate emergency help. But then again, when the Pats were down 28-3 to Atlanta it said I was having a stroke, so they have no idea what I’m capable of handling. I lived through other bogus calls before. There was Hug Gate, when Luke Kuechley got called for pass interference on Gronk on the final play, but the ref picked up the flag. Something even SportsScience called bullshit on:

That cost them home field throughout the playoffs and they lost at Denver in the AFCCG. Then there was the Philly Special:

And others I don’t have time to go into. Let’s just say that 21-game home winning streaks don’t die easily. They need help. And that help came in the person of referee Jerome Boger, who, coincidentally, reffed the last Patriots loss at Gillette. A game decided by this bog(er)us call:

And yesterday we learned that Bogerman is more powerful than The Boogeymen.

Anyway, as you’d imagine, Tom Brady took the dreaded high road this morning on his weekly, contractually-obligated WEEI appearance:

“Well, I think when you play sports long enough, sometimes you’re the recipient of things that go your way and then you’re on the other side of it, too,” he said. “For me, I don’t think too much about them. I wish they would go our way and unfortunately they didn’t. That doesn’t take away from when you watch the game all the different things we had in our control that I wish we could have done a little bit better.”

Just as we’ve become accustomed to from a guy who eats kale shakes and reads “The Four Agreements” instead of rare steaks and “American Psycho.” And while I’d always prefer he use the power of his position as the greatest player in NFL history to put the league on blast for their gross incompetence, it’s simply not him. It’s not how Brady is wired. This is not the way.

Fortunately for those of us who’d like to see the officials called out for their blatant and repeated fuckupery, at least one team leader is wired to do just that. Leave it to Pat Chung to strap on the Mandalorian armor, take aim and fire his Amban phase pulse blaster in the right direction. The New Hampshire Lakes Region’s favorite alleged cocaine-possession defendant shot his shot:

And the guys who were victimized most by the egregious calls made it known the officials screwed them, while stopping short of calling them Chiefs “fans” or saying anything that can get them fined.

For Gilmore, this is nothing new. For Harry it can be his “Welcome to the Majors, Mr. Hobbs” moment. Regardless, it’s just good to hear that, even while the most important player to ever live has already found acceptance and moved on, that the rage exists in the locker room and they recognized how badly they got boned, and use this as rage fuel going forward.

Never forget, N’Keal Harry. Never, ever forget. How you respond to this will define your career.