TOM BRADY WAS ALWAYS BLESSED with a great arm. He has accomplished so much in his

22 years in the NFL that the basic act of throwing the ball is easy to overlook. He always felt confident in his arm, something he could always rely on, and he gave the ball life when he threw it, out of an awkward and gangly body. It was evident from a young age. At football practice one day at San Mateo’s Junipero Serra High School almost 30 years ago, it was windy, and receivers were dropping passes. Brady dialed up the heat, spirals cutting through wind, the California kid immune to elements before he had ever played in the snow and cold of Michigan and New England.

It didn’t help. Receivers kept dropping the ball. Brady lost his patience, a perfectionist regardless of venue or stakes, and after practice, he was struggling to calm down, complaining about things he couldn’t control, a self-described “whiner” who looked to blame others before himself. His coach, Tom MacKenzie, was having none of it.

“You need to be more patient,” MacKenzie said.

MacKenzie had what Brady lacked — perspective — but whatever he hoped to share with his young quarterback failed to sink in. It wasn’t what Brady wanted to hear. The coach took a deep breath.

on this field,” he told Brady. “You know what? There’s a very good chance that 10 years from now, everybody else on this field will no longer be playing. You’re still going to be playing.

“You need to understand that you are one of a kind.”

MOMENTS LIKE THAT are lore only in retrospect, and so it’s asking worth now, as he is

reportedly set to walk away after the greatest career for a quarterback in NFL history: Did Brady ever truly understand that he was one of a kind? Does he allow himself to understand it now, at the end?

Part of the answer is obvious: Yes, he did, and he does. The first time I met Brady, in the early winter of 2001, when he was 24 and just getting started on a career only he saw coming, he said, “Football’s always come very easy to me.” He said it with a touch of cockiness and with the earnest assurance that he meant it, to the bottom of his soul.

If there is an organizing philosophy of Tom Brady’s life, it’s that he took what he was given, and kept taking, and then took more, until there was nothing left to take. And this wasn’t some fortuitous personality trait waiting to be animated. Think of Aretha the first time she knew what notes she could hit, and from where. Of Jimi the first time his fingers made a sound, and from where. Of Michael when he realized how high he could jump, and from where. Of Tiger the moment it hit him what shots he could drop in, and from where. With great power comes great possibility. The Brady arm made the Brady mind, setting it to work, wondering, asking, pushing. What more could it do? What couldn’t it do?

IN MARCH 2013, Brady had me over to his townhouse in the Back Bay neighborhood of

Boston to discuss where he was at in life and in work. He would be 37 when the next season started, hadn’t won a Super Bowl since the 2004 season, and had three young kids. He was in transition, but not the transition that most professional athletes are at that moment in life. A decade or so earlier, he had noted to people close to him that many professional quarterbacks trail off after they have kids and are spread too thin, unable to devote the time and energy and focus to their careers. He swore that wouldn’t ever be him. He resolved to not have kids early and never fall victim to that fate. At the same time, he had been raised in a loving family, with two attentive parents, and although he knew that his celebrity and fortune would prevent him from parenting his children as he had been parented, he wanted his kids to think of him as the type of father that Tom Brady Sr. had been to him: a hard worker but always present.

Time is the great equalizer, in life and in sport, and Brady planned to bend it to his will. An either-or decision to most would be a both decision to him. He was in the process of opening the first TB12 office, near Gillette Stadium. He had retooled his throwing motion, working with throwing expert and former pitcher Tom House. He started to speak of playing into his mid-40s with such nonchalance that it too was easy to overlook, or not take seriously, but as we started talking, the idea of a backup plan came up. If football didn’t work out, what would he do?

He had managed to face that question many times and not answer it. In high school, a guidance counselor asked him where he would apply to college, and he replied that he didn’t need to apply because he was going to be a football player. As a benchwarmer at Michigan, he told his parents that one day he’d have his photo on the wall of an off-campus diner lined with famous Wolverines. When he finished college, he told his parents that he would be “one of 32” starting quarterbacks. After he became one of 32, he set sights on becoming something more than the greatest ever. He wanted to be so accomplished that when you thought of a quarterback — and the strange archetypal space it occupies in American life — you thought of him before anyone else.

“I’ve never had a backup plan, you know?” he told me. “I’ve never said, ‘Well, if that doesn’t work, I’m going to do this.’ It’s like, ‘No, this is what I’m going to do.”

“Do you have one now?” I asked.

“No. Certainly not.”

So forget conventional wisdom; Brady was going to try to accomplish the impossible. In the coming few years, he won two more Super Bowls, both rallying his team from double-digit fourth-quarter deficits, opened his TB12 businesses, wrote a New York Times-bestselling lifestyle guide, began to speak alongside author Tony Robbins and grew to kind of resemble him, with bright teeth and a determined smile and a message to the masses from a headset mic that we have the power in our minds and hearts to transcend anything. Nothing could stop him — not Deflategate, not internal problems with the New England Patriots that led him to ask for his release in 2018 and certainly not any opponent that the league threw out on game day. He won his sixth Super Bowl in 2019 and, after Bill Belichick and Robert Kraft gambled that his best days were clearly behind him, won a seventh last year for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Each step of the way, each time we wondered if he had finally had his last helping of professional football, Brady spoke of a passion for the game that continued to intensify with every accomplishment.

Brady wasn’t perfect all of the time, and he often defeated opponents with a deadly array of unremarkable throws. But he had conditioned himself to never quit. Once, after a playoff loss, Kurt Warner texted Brady: Being the best doesn’t mean you always win. It just means you win more than anybody else. It meant a lot to Brady — so much that he always remembered it — not because it was language of one quarterback to another but because someone else saw his essence: That it was often in failure that Brady found successes. It’s why those who argued that he’d never leave New England after throwing a pick-six on his final throw were wrong — and why those who argued this past week that he’d never walk away after a playoff loss to the Los Angeles Rams were wrong. Brady always played for team and for friendships, but he also played most of all for himself — to redefine what we and what maybe even he thought was possible, having redefined it many times. He had a genius, an annoying genius to some, in refusing to concede to anyone else’s idea of reality, inevitability or status.

“If you keep knocking at the door, you’re going to win at some point,” Brady once told me. “You’re going to get that ball that goes your way. You’re going to get a call that maybe you wouldn’t have gotten before. You’re going to make a play that wasn’t made before. So you know, I’m glad we keep knocking at the door.”

Did all of that knocking make him the greatest quarterback ever? Most people think so, including Belichick. But that’s not really the point. Brady has become something else: his own unique force. For as long as he has been doing this, he has been the answer to every question. Who else would you rather have with the ball in his hands — on a mundane play, on a critical play, on third down or after he had thrown an interception or with the division on the line, with the conference championship on the line, with the Super Bowl on the line? For a while, it was Johnny Unitas. Then Joe Montana. Then John Elway. Then, nobody … until 2001. Since then, Tom Brady has taken that gifted arm and willed himself into many ideas and notions, but most of all, he has managed to deliver a clinical certainty, as singular as seven Super Bowls. That’s what his opponents had to contend with.

It wasn’t just his brilliance as a player; it was that he was a force that not only won games but seemed to cause opponents to lose them. Of all the absences now that he is expected to be gone, that will be the biggest. There is no certainty like him anymore.

with all of us expecting his retirement video to be posted any day, imagine what becoming that certainty does to someone. Imagine the blessings and the costs. For a while, Brady couldn’t sleep after a lost Super Bowl. Then, after a bad game. Then, after a loss, any loss. Then, after a turnover. Consider the dark places his mind would go, the doubt that a man who refuses to acknowledge the idea doubt would feel, the mental conditioning required to bounce back from errors seen at times by the world and at other times by nobody but himself, and the ruthlessness and selfishness required to see it through to another practice, another Sunday, another completion, another win, another year, two decades running …

The cracks were not secret. For years, Gisele Bundchen has been clear in her public stance that she would prefer that her husband walk away. In private, she is more blunt. She was similarly the best in the world at her craft and retired to help the family. During the season, she lived in Boston, in the cold and dark, a big city that got small really fast if you happened to be famous, to say nothing of a global celebrity. In the offseason, she would ask her husband, “Is this a Tommy day or a family day?” It was often a Tommy day. In a sense, it is remarkable that Tommy Brady from Portola Drive in San Mateo possessed an ambition so vast that he could marry the world’s most famous model and not only eclipse her career but publicly decline her wishes. After the Bucs beat the Kansas City Chiefs for the Lombardi trophy, the first thing she said to her husband was, “What more do you have to prove?” He managed to dodge answering, and earlier this year, he signed an extension and started to speak of playing into his 50s.

But this season, something changed. Brady is a process guy, and as much as he liked his coaches personally, Tampa Bay wasn’t as buttoned-up as Belichick’s Patriots, and that was evident at the end of the Rams game. The Bucs are in transition, having gone all in to win with Brady and now brought back to earth with salary-cap and roster issues. And this year, more than any other, Brady stepped beyond the football field. He started a podcast with his friend, broadcaster Jim Gray, and Larry Fitzgerald. He starred in “Man in the Arena” on ESPN+. He continued pushing TB12 then launched the Brady Brand clothing line.

Brady Brand seemed to energize him in a way that, for the longest time, only football did. He saw potential in it like he once saw on a field: a chance to revolutionize sports, with gear, with fitness, with diet and wellness, with this all-encompassing world of stuff that he used to build upon his gifts.

“That’s what Jordan did!” he told a friend late last year. Of course, we’ve heard this before with legends when they walk away. They pivot to the business world, only to learn the hard way what Brady already knows — and what he has said for years: that nothing can replace the game.

Still, that’s where he is now. Tom Brady isn’t going anywhere, but the stakes and the venue will change. He told Gray last week that, “It’s not always what I want; it’s what we want as a family.” But make no mistake: It’ll still be what Tom Brady wants, whatever that next step will be. Brady has always been a man on his own clock, and he has conquered all that he can in his particular arena — the biggest one America has to offer. That leaves only the world. If it’s enough.

HE ENTERED THE NFL 22 years ago after nearly going undrafted in search of a big stage

enough to fit his talents and dreams, and he exited likely for the last time on Saturday as a man who had outgrown that very stage. The game was over. The Rams had won, 30-27. He walked with his head down, having helped to engineer a comeback from a 27-3 deficit, only to witness what he usually does to other teams happen to his own squad. This time, it was he, not the opposing quarterback, who left just enough time for another passer to create some magic. This time, it was his team, not the opposing one, that committed a critical error in the highest-leverage moment, trying to cover the game’s most dangerous slot receiver with a safety. This time, it was the opposing team that stole a win on the road, not his own. The Rams scored the winning field goal with no time left, the only way mankind has known to beat Brady on a football field. Brady walked quickly off the field, carrying a helmet in his left hand, surrounded by cameras, lip with dried blood, looking for all the world like a man in transition, as always, from one stage of life to another and from one story written to another unwritten, sure, but maybe also from a large stage to an even larger one, with more for the taking.