Tom Brady was a unique Philadelphia sports villain against the Eagles. Salute him as he retires. | Mike Sielski

Now that he has gotten around to making his retirement official — and wasn’t that He’s out / No, he’s still in / Wait, he’ll be out eventually elevator-drop ride Saturday fun? — Tom Brady will go down as the greatest quarterback in NFL history … and as a unique villain in Philadelphia sports history. Unique in this regard: He was a villain no one hated.

That’s weird. This is Philly. We love us some hate — hate in the healthy sense of the word, hate in the tribal, sports-centric sense of the word, hate in the way that people around here can’t help defining themselves and their teams in opposition to other franchises and athletes and fan bases.

Philly hated the Dallas Cowboys because they were “America’s Team,” smug and successful and from a region so culturally different from this one. Philly hated the Pittsburgh Pirates in the 1970s because they were so good and they hated the Atlanta Braves for a decade-and-a-half, starting in the 1990s, because they were better, and because nobody could hit Greg Maddux or Tom Glavine or John Smoltz. Philly hated Scott Stevens before what he did to Eric Lindros, and Philly really hated him after what he did to Eric Lindros. Philly hated Kobe Bryant because he wasn’t really from Philly — just ask anyone who grew up within the city limits — and yet he thought himself better than Philly, beyond Philly, even though, if he had spent his career in Philly, he would have been a god here.

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Few people in Philadelphia hated Brady. People here — whether they played for the Eagles, coached the Eagles, worked for the Eagles, covered the Eagles, or rooted for the Eagles — respected him. They sure as hell feared him. But Brady checked the boxes for the particular combination of qualities that the fan base here prizes.

Despite all the controversies and “gates” around him – Spygate, Deflategate, Why Didn’t He Shake Nick Foles’ Handgate — he won so many Super Bowls and MVP awards and set so many records that no one could dispute his greatness. And he came from such unexpected and relatively humble beginnings, as a sixth-round draft pick who Wally Pipped the incumbent starter, that any sense of entitlement he betrayed was perceived as earned entitlement. The story of his journey was so good and the measure of his excellence was so high that they blunted and softened any resentment of him.

And make no mistake: Long before Brady toyed with the Eagles twice this season, including in a playoff game in Tampa for the final victory of his career, there were plenty of reasons for Philly football fans to resent him. One of the oft-forgotten aspects of the 19 years that Brady and Bill Belichick spent together as the NFL’s dominant quarterback-coach duo is that the Eagles had begun their search for such a pair — and thought they had found them — first. The Eagles hired Andy Reid and drafted Donovan McNabb in 1999. The Patriots hired Belichick and drafted Brady in 2000; by the time Brady took over for Drew Bledsoe early in the 2001 season, Reid and McNabb already had fashioned an 11-5 season and won a playoff game.

Yet for the next nine seasons, McNabb-Reid was merely Diet Brady-Belichick, with the added frustration that the Patriots hadn’t followed a carefully researched plan or formula to create their two decades of excellence. They just happened, with the 199th player selected in the 2000 draft, to stumble into immortality, and the gap between them and the Eagles became obvious on one of the pivotal days of the Brady-Belichick partnership.

Less than a week before the 2003 season, Belichick cut veteran safety Lawyer Milloy, a decision greeted by puzzlement, criticism, and — after the Patriots’ 31-0 Week 1 loss to the Bills — ridicule. With their season already ostensibly in the balance, the Patriots came to Lincoln Financial Field in Week 2 for a matchup against the Eagles, the first of Brady’s career. He threw for 255 yards and three touchdowns, and the Patriots won in a rout, 31-10, their first victory in a season that ended not in tatters but in Super Bowl XXXVIII, in the second of Brady’s six championships with New England.

Because Philadelphia tends to be parochial at best and myopic at worst when it comes to its collective view on sports (and many other topics), there remains a tendency to frame the Eagles’ inability to match or surpass the Patriots during that period as solely a function of Reid’s and McNabb’s failures or shortcomings. Super Bowl XXXIX in Jacksonville? The focus is entirely on Reid’s slow-playing that late fourth-quarter drive and McNabb’s alleged gastrointestinal upheaval, a view that ignores or at least minimizes the core truth of that game: By the time Reid and McNabb were making Eagles fans apoplectic, the quarterback and coach responsible for the longest dynastic run in NFL history already had forged a 10-point lead. Completing a comeback under those circumstances, against that opponent, would have been miraculous.

Of course, once the Eagles and the city got to revel in their own championship, in the still-dizzying outcome of Super Bowl LII, the warm memories were made all the more satisfying because the victory had come at Brady’s expense. As marvelous as he was that night in Minneapolis — the 505 passing yards, the three touchdowns — he had shown, however briefly, his own fallibility. He dropped a trick-play pass that could have changed the game, and he allowed Brandon Graham to slap the football out of his right hand late in the fourth quarter.

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High times for Philadelphia and its football team, indeed. It’s still a point of pride here, getting the better of Tom Brady that one time. And it’s only when you remind yourself that he has seven times more Super Bowl victories than the team you love, that the most magical of moments here was a feeling that had long become commonplace to him, that you stop taunting him from afar or cursing his name. You just tip your cap to him again and wish him well.

Eagles beat reporters EJ Smith and Josh Tolentino are in Mobile, Ala., for the 2022 Senior Bowl, where NFL teams scout top college players ahead of the draft in April. For this special edition of Inquirer LIVE, watch EJ and Josh discuss the Eagles’ top off-season priorities, analyze how the team might use its three first-round picks, and provide observations of this year’s talent at the Senior Bowl.

Registration Link: Inquirer.com/SeniorBowl