The first recorded fan Tom Brady had in New England was Bill Montanaro.
I know this as fact. I was there when he staked his claim.
The Patriots were playing an exhibition game against the Washington Football Team (that's not what they were called back then). I was excited to see Drew Bledsoe play a quarter against Jeff George and his sweet mustache.
The Bud Lights we consumed that evening and the passing of 20 years have clouded my memory as far as details of how the game went, but I vividly remember one moment from New England's 33-10 win.
Sometime in the second half — or so I'm assuming — the Patriots' second-year quarterback that I only knew as Drew Henson's backup at Michigan started warming up. I was heckling some Washington fans about how awesome Bledsoe was, how the Patriots were going turn things around when Bill said the words that have lived in infamy among my friend group.
"Look at the arm on this Brady kid," he stammered that evening, perhaps with a few descriptive expletives thrown in. "I really like this guy."
Ready for Brady's return
Twenty years later, things haven't changed for Bill — or for many around New England.
Bill will be at Gillette Stadium Sunday with two of my friends who were there for that preseason game. I'll be there as well and while my seats won't be as good and I won't be nearly as lubed up, my feelings about the game will probably be similar.
There's no question who Bill will root for on Sunday. He might be the Bradiest of Brady backers, but just because the greatest quarterback who ever lived is in a different uniform doesn't mean he's suddenly going to jump ship.
"Your loyalties are still with the team. People come and go, there are legends and you remember them and everything that went with them. You don't take those championships or memories away," Bill says. "But you can't change your colors. I'm not going to be a Tampa fan and I'm not going to buy a Tampa Bay Brady jersey because that's just stupid."
His opinion is not wrong. In fact, it's very correct.
You're either a Patriots fan or you've been pretending to be one for the last 20 years.
Either way, it still doesn't stop Sunday from being very, very weird.
Sunday is the day every single New England fan thought they'd never see — Tom Brady playing at Gillette Stadium in another team's uniform. It was easy to accept TB12's departure from a distance last fall, despite the Patriots having their most miserable season since dial-up internet was a thing.
Where you fall is going to depend on which generation of fan you are.
Brady fans through the years
The younger generation was born into championship. All they have known is Patriots, Brady and Super Bowls. Their loyalty isn't necessarily with the team — it's with the winning and celebrations that come with it.
Now the older generation, they've been through the grind. They remember when the Patriots were a distant fourth among the Boston pro sports teams. They liked the Patriots before they were The Patriots and just because the pretty boy quarterback decided to bail on the entire region doesn't change their feelings of the team.
Now my friends and I are part of that generation that falls right between. It's the sweet-spot of Patriots' fandom because the team's rise to success coincided with our own personal growth as sports fans.
That fandom grew in the late 1980s and early '90s, when we were too young to be mentally beaten down by the team's ineptitude. We rejoiced when Bill Parcells and Drew Bledsoe made the team respectable, but by the late '90s the Patriots still ranked behind the Red Sox, girls, friends and our own athletic endeavors in terms of importance. Football was a minor distraction, not our lifeblood. We weren't tied into our fandom. Not yet.
Then came college, Tom Brady, and in the blink of an eye we spent the best years of our lives watching the greatest quarterback who ever played bring six Super Bowls to a team none of us thought would ever win one.
In our 20s, Tom Brady made Sundays events. We opened and closed bars down in Providence, R.I., or Boston or wherever we happened to be watching games.
As we reached our 30s, priorities changed. We all got married, had kids and while we weren't getting together every Sunday — or even more than three or four times a season — Brady and the Patriots were still a constant.
At the start of each season I'd tell Bill — whose father has been a season ticket holder since the early 1980s — I didn't know which regular-season game I wanted to go to our annual "guys' game" but I'd definitely be in for the AFC Championship Game. It would have been the cockiest thing in the world if it didn't happen every year because we had Tom Brady and you didn't.
Then it all stopped.
Coping with the breakup
Brady left. Won a Super Bowl somewhere else. It felt like the Patriots stopped being the Patriots.
None of it felt right. It was all so sudden and it still doesn't make sense.
"I don't feel sad about it because I knew the chapter had to end at some point," Bill says. "It doesn't feel like we got any closure and there's just this weird empty feeling. This is a very odd way to see this play out."
He's not wrong.
For this column, I wanted to see how some of my friends — minus a buddy who was a Steelers fan right until Brady and the Pats beat them in the AFC title game in 2001 — felt about Sunday.
Who were they rooting for? Brady and the Bucs? Or the Patriots?
"Brady will always be a hero, I so I won't boo him," texted my buddy Blue. "But I will be wearing my new Mac Jones jersey."
"I think Brady" said C-Money, and yes, I'm 40 years old and have a friend we all call C-Money. "Just [expletive] them up and go double middle fingers. I just think the Pats [messed] this up and need to pay."
"Tom completed me," texted Cournoyer, my college roommate at URI who went hunting when the Patriots were scheduled to play the Colts in 2001, and told us they had no chance to win and if they did, he'd wash our cars. He still owes us a car wash. "Now he's gone and I want things to be the same."
"[Brady] is a traitor," says Bill's son Bradley, who's 9 years old and — in the wildest of coincidences — shares a birthday with Brady, much to his dad's delight. When I asked why he wants the Patriots to win, the answer was simple.
"Because they're our home team and Tom Brady and Gronk are traitors."
Justin Rechter is one of my more level-headed friends. Maybe not as level-headed as Bradley, but it's close.
Brady's departure didn't devastate him as much as he thought it would — or at least not as much as it would have when he was in his 20s.
Rechter rejoiced over the Buccaneers Super Bowl title because it was just another chance to prove any Brady doubters how wrong they were.
"As someone with a lot of ex-girlfriends and seeing them get married, I've been able to see them be happy and I can be happy, too," said Rechter, who is happily married to his wife Pam who understands how insane he is about his teams. "It's still weird, but I still try to stay positive and recognize what he did here. He gave us 20 years of bliss."
Rechter also wasn't a Tom Brady fan at first. He was Bledsoe guy, one of the many who thought Bledsoe was the only shot the Pats had to beat the Rams in that first Super Bowl. He's such a big Bledsoe fan it's not a coincidence his son's name is Andrew.
His loyalty to Bledsoe changed once the original No. 11 got shipped to Buffalo. Rechter backed Brady ever since, even going a little Twitter crazy defending TB12 during the Deflategate season. When I say "a little," I mean it just about consumed his every waking hour.
Today, he still backs Brady. But not this weekend.
"One-hundred percent I'm cheering for the Patriots on Sunday. I hope they make Brady look foolish," Rechter says. "I don't really care if Brady does well or not this year because he's got nothing left to prove."
Bill's hope is Sunday ends up being a catalyst for the Patriots' season. A win would be monumental for momentum and even a tight loss wouldn't be terrible, but there is a nightmare scenario that would make a loss hurt more than David Tyree's catch, Eli Manning's throw or Malcolm Butler's benching put together.
"There's no way this happens because there's no way the Patriots will be there, but what if it's a close game?," Bill says. "What if there's a minute-and-a-half left, the Patriots are up two points and Brady gets the ball?
"We'll be in the stands and all be like 'well, we're screwed,' because we've seen what happens. We've just never been on that side."
We haven't.
But that changes Sunday.
