We know what you’re thinking: Screw the NFL and every other repulsively woke professional sports league. And we can’t disagree. But for a moment, can we agree to set all that aside and celebrate Tom Brady, a singular American athlete, the likes of whom we will never see again?

Would it help if we told you he was a supporter of Donald Trump?

Okay, then. Last night, the 43-year-old Brady, who until this year had played his entire NFL career with one team, the New England Patriots, took a 7-9 Tampa Bay Buccaneers team and willed them to a 15-5 record, an eight-game winning streak including three straight road playoff wins, and a 31-9 win in the 55th Super Bowl over the favored Kansas City Chiefs — a win that, as luck would have it, was played at home in Tampa Bay. In doing so, Brady bested two certain Hall of Fame quarterbacks – New Orleans’s Drew Brees and Green Bay’s Aaron Rogers – and one, Mahomes, who also seems destined for Canton.

There, in front of 25,000 football fans and 30,000 ridiculous COVID cutouts, the old man who many thought represented the NFL’s past squared off against a 25-year-old quarterback, KC’s Patrick Mahomes, who everyone agrees is the NFL’s future. And the old man won, resoundingly, and earned his seventh Super Bowl ring and his fifth Super Bowl MVP trophy.

Before Brady arrived, the Buccaneers were perennial losers. But for a short-lived shining moment when they won the 2003 Super Bowl, the Bucs had amassed the worst career winning percentage among professional sports teams. Brady, for his part, is the individual athlete with the best winning percentage in team sports.

Obviously, something had to give. And it wasn’t Brady. His teammates bought in to Brady’s will, his work ethic, and his culture of excellence. This is how we win, Brady seemed to say. And he made it so.

For a sense of what Brady achieved last night, consider this: One of his teammates, Antoine Winfield Jr., is the son of a former NLFer who Brady competed against both in college and as a pro. Or consider this: Mahomes, the quarterback he beat, was just six years old when Brady won his first Super Bowl, and Mahomes’s dad is just seven years older than Brady. Or this: Brady’s offensive coordinator, Byron Leftwich, began his NFL quarterbacking career three years after Brady did, played nine years in the league, and still retired nearly a decade before Brady will one day hang ‘em up.

As for the record books, Brady has pushed all the meaningful numbers beyond reach. For example, only two other quarterbacks — Hall of Famers Terry Bradshaw of the Pittsburgh Steelers and Joe Montana of the San Francisco 49ers — have even four Super Bowl rings. Indeed, Brady the individual has won more Super Bowls than any other NFL team, and has won more Super Bowls than 18 NFL teams COMBINED.

Brady’s individual stats are every bit as eye-popping, even if they’ve never been what drives him. What drives him is winning, and no one in team sports — with the possible exception of the Boston Celtics’ great center, Bill Russell, who played in an NBA league with far fewer teams and therefore a far greater chance of winning championships — has ever done it better than Brady.

The seeds of greatness were there to be seen back in the 2000 Orange Bowl when, as a senior quarterback at Michigan, he twice brought the Wolverines back from 14-point deficits to beat an excellent Alabama team. Still, nobody in the NFL wanted Tom Brady. Really. Tom Brady, the guy who is arguably the greatest athlete in the history of American team sports, wasn’t the first quarterback picked in the 2000 NFL Draft. Nor the second. Nor the third, fourth, fifth, or sixth. Tom Brady was the seventh QB and the 199th player picked in that draft. (“The Brady 6” is a superb sports documentary and a fascinating glimpse into what makes Brady who he is. If you’re in a big hurry, skip ahead to the 40-minute mark and watch the next two minutes.)

Brady has taken some shots during his career, perhaps none of them cheaper than the one thrown around regularly by hate-filled leftists and mainstream media types. These tiny folks can’t seem to accept the fact that Tom Brady is a friend of former President Donald Trump, and he has been since around 2002. When Trump first campaigned in 2016, Brady was seen with a MAGA hat in his locker, and the intolerant Left has never let him forget it. In their eyes Brady is, like 74 million other Americans, a deplorable.

Those who admire both Brady and Trump must’ve taken special satisfaction at the way last night’s event played out. What better dish to serve up to the haters than a heaping helping of humble pie?

When asked last Monday about whether “being white” had given him a pass for the offense of being a friend of Trump, Brady said, “I’m not sure how to respond to [a] hypothetical like that. I hope everyone can — we’re in this position like I am to, again, try to be the best I can be every day as an athlete, as a player, as a person in my community, for my team and so forth, so yeah, I’m not sure what else.”

It reminds one of the thoughtfulness with which he answered a question many years ago about his relative physical limitations — his lack of strength, his lack of foot speed, his poor vertical jump, and his average arm strength. Back then, Brady said, matter-of-factly, “It’s not really what my skill set is, but fortunately for me, that’s not what quarterbacking is about either.”

That’s fortunate for Brady’s now-Super Bowl champion teammates, too. “All week,” said Tampa Bay running back Leonard Fournette, “he made us believe we were going to win. He was texting us at 11 o'clock at night, ‘We will win this game.’ We believe in him. … We just ran with it.”

So they do. And so they did.

Updated.