James Bradberry’s penalty in the Eagles’ Super Bowl loss drove everyone crazy. Except him.

James Bradberry says that he doesn’t think about the penalty that cost the Eagles the Super Bowl. Not unless someone asks him about it. So after the Eagles practiced Friday at the NovaCare Complex, someone asked him about it. Before we get to Bradberry’s answer, the topic requires some narrative unpacking and lots of what-ifs.

Yes, yes, it might be unfair to home in on Bradberry like this, especially after so much time has passed since the Eagles’ 38-35 loss at State Farm Stadium on Feb. 12.

After all, everyone knows the cliche that every play in every game is important and no single mistake by a player or bad call by an official determines the final outcome. And everyone knows that the Kansas City Chiefs turned a Jalen Hurts fumble into a game-changing touchdown, that Quez Watkins turned a potential big play into a momentum-killing drop, and that Andy Reid went full Westley-vs.-Vizzini on Jonathan Gannon in the second half.

But let’s be real. Super Bowl LVII was tied with 1 minute, 54 seconds to go and Kansas City was facing a third-and-8 when Bradberry was flagged for holding JuJu Smith-Schuster. The penalty gave the Chiefs a first down and allowed them to run the clock down until, when Harrison Butker hit the winning field goal, eight seconds remained in regulation. Give the ball back to Hurts that night with 90 seconds to go and two timeouts, and even with the Eagles down by three, you’d still have to like their chances to force overtime at least.

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Then there’s the issue of whether the call was correct and justifiable. Yes on the former, less so on the latter. It was a hold — a subtle hold, but a hold nonetheless. Bradberry admitted as much in the locker room afterward.

The key question was whether the officials had established an unspoken rule: In that particular game, they would not penalize a defensive back for that particular kind of hold. If they broke that rule by calling that hold on Bradberry, then he, the Eagles, and their fans have a pretty legitimate beef, and if they wanted, they could continue driving themselves crazy with outrage and might-have-beens.

James Bradberry has not driven himself crazy over that penalty. He has more than five months of distance from it, and from then to now, he has handled the incident and its aftermath in the same standup manner. As he said, he answers when he’s asked about it — and he had to be asked about it. But by all indications, he does not dwell on it and does not wallow in any disappointment or anger about it.

“I try to live my life with a DB mindset,” he said Friday. “A play’s going to happen. Good play, bad play — you’ve got to move on to the next one. That’s how I really thought about it.”

He applies the same principle to the other aspects of his career, too. He will turn 30 on Thursday, and the cornerback opposite him, Darius Slay, is 32. Both of them were selected to the Pro Bowl last season; the Associated Press named Bradberry to its All-Pro second team. But neither of them is, by the NFL definition of the term, young. Can they repeat that same measure of excellence?

“The best thing we can do is just forget about what we did last year and move on to this year,” said Bradberry, who must be a huge Ted Lasso fan, because he apparently has the memory of a goldfish. “I think we can be as good as we want to be. I know Slay, for one, I feel like he’s a Hall of Famer. He’s one of the greatest corners of this decade — well, of this past decade, and we’re trying to build in this decade, as well.”

Was he sensitive to making Slay sound old?

“You know what?” Bradberry said. “We’re both getting up there in age, but that’s what also makes us better. We have a lot of experience. Whatever we lack, we make up for it in our mental game.”

» READ MORE: How All-Pro CB James Bradberry decided the Eagles were the right fit — and against ‘more lucrative’ offers

In March, he re-signed with the Eagles, considering other options in free agency but ultimately agreeing to a three-year contract that could be worth as much as $38 million. Maybe it’s a silly question, but did he fear that the Super Bowl penalty would be held against him (no pun intended) by the teams that were interested in signing him?

“I wasn’t worried about that,” Bradberry said. “I felt like I had a pretty good year. Had it affected the signing, I just would have had to live with it.”

He has learned to live with a lot of things. It’s a credit to his character that he has.