The Patriots are ready for DeflateGate revenge

FOXBOROUGH, Mass. -- “My father took me by the hand when I was a kid and we walked along the beach. He said, `You have a wonderful way of not holding grudges that can hurt you. Stay that way and you’ll have a happy life. And when you feel high and mighty, come back here and look out at the ocean and how vast it is and look beneath you and know from both that your life is like a blink of an eye, like a grain of sand.”

-- from an interview with Robert Kraft in New Orleans in 2002

Robert Kraft told me that in a hotel suite a couple of days before his New England Patriots won the first of their four Super Bowl championships. His father, Harry, imparted that lesson that still resonates. Kraft was age 60 then. He is age 74 now. Stronger. Wiser. Seasoned. Tested. Hurt. Grateful. Wary. Weary.

Riding the waves.

Since buying the Patriots in 1994, his teams have reached seven Super Bowls. He built a new stadium. He lost his angelic wife, Myra. He created a workable relationship with his crusty coach Bill Belichick and he has watched quarterback Tom Brady start the first game in the last 13 Patriots seasons.

All of it, the whole combustible lot of it, has been in turmoil since January when DeflateGate surfaced and the Patriots and Brady were crafted as cheaters. The franchise and Brady were viewed as maulers on the integrity of the game over football pressure levels.

When a federal judge ruled on Thursday morning that Brady’s four-game suspension was overturned, that what the NFL did in its investigation and penalty distribution was, basically, illegal, Kraft, Brady and the Patriots had their salve. They had their retribution and vindication. They found healing from the stain and the sting.

So did all of Patriots nation that showed up here at Gillette Stadium for the preseason game against the Giants -- less a game at all and more a Patriots exhale.

Particularly for Kraft and Brady, anger and embarrassment turned into relief.

They will run with it, wiping clean their Super Bowl rings won over the Seattle Seahawks last February. They will hang the championship banners here now when their season opens on next Thursday against Pittsburgh.

They hold their heads a little higher now.

They did tonight. It rained late in the game, but it blew over. The dark clouds passed.

And you got the unmistakable feeling from the Patriots and their fans that, in their minds and hearts, there is no appeal the league can file, no future legal finding that will dim this reprieve.

Count Brady in for his 14th straight Patriots opener.

Count on Kraft to reflect while still figuring out a sustainable way to move forward within the league, no matter how taxing or testy.

Honestly, owners across the league and executives, too, are shocked that this verdict turned this way. Houston Texans owner Bob McNair roasted Brady as guilty earlier this week, and he is far from alone among his peers in that belief. Many of them anticipated a hammer on Brady. Now they are questioning Goodell’s lawyers, his counsel, his team.

As one league executive told me tonight: “How could this group of lawyers get this so wrong on so many levels and make Roger look so bad? I’m sure he is counting on them to advise him, his team. They look inept right now. Their arrogance is appalling.”

Inept? Or sly? Because conspiracy theorists say if the league wanted to create its own out from the DeflateGate mess, why not bungle the case so badly that all is cleared and Brady plays? Nonsense?

Well, just know this: The league may have lost, but it also won. Brady is playing in a nationally-televised season-opening game with realty-TV-like-driven drama that sells. The NFL is entertainment, folks. So, the league loses. The league wins.

These owners are beginning to crack, one by one, on the idea of their commissioner being judge and jury in handling player discipline. It has always been the owners’ idea to maintain that control within the league. However, it is clear that change is brewing.

Belichick is already concocting messages, driving home motivation for the Patriots to use this entire fiasco as the foundation for a repeat championship season. “Mr. Situational Football” has the perfectly dynamic situation to create an “Us Against the World, Us Against The League” mantra. An obsessed Brady driving it is a scary thing.

A bruised Goodell passing off the Super Bowl 50 trophy in San Francisco/Santa Clara to Kraft, Brady and Belichick five months from now would be the ultimate bow tied on an ugly knot. It would be squirmish. It would be repulsive and delectable all at once.

No matter how it further shakes, Brady has proved his sturdy mettle.

Kraft has, too.

This is what he also told me in that New Orleans setting that endures:

‘‘Most people don’t stay with it, they don’t want it bad enough to go through the pain, the negativity or the times when you are battered. Most people don’t have the stamina or the stomach to go through it. I go back to the ocean and I think it’s like the tide that rolls in and out. You ride the waves.”