Love, hate and Brady: How Tom became the improbable lightning rod

— -- This story appears in ESPN The Magazine's February 6 Super Bowl Preview Issue.? Subscribe today!

Tom Brady is addicted to playing catch. Ask any of his friends or teammates and they will testify to this. He loves playing catch the way some people love fly-fishing. It's a physical act that feels, at times, almost spiritual. He's not a snob about it. He'll happily play catch with his wife, his kids, his friends, with Hall of Fame receivers or with journeyman dreamers who barely sniffed the NFL.

At the start of the 2016 NFL season, when Brady began serving his four-game Deflategate suspension, he wasn't allowed to have contact with anyone on the Patriots, or anyone in the NFL. So he and his trainer, Alex Guerrero, came up with an idea. They reached out to Ryan McManus, a 5-foot-11 receiver who had played at Dartmouth. The Patriots had invited McManus to rookie camp in 2016 but ultimately cut him. Now he was working in marketing for a company selling robotic tackling dummies. McManus ran great routes and had great hands. He didn't have the prototypical NFL body, but he had the talent to keep Brady sharp. The chance to work out with Brady was the chance to keep his NFL dream, however improbable, alive. McManus couldn't say yes fast enough.

Brady shields his privacy, the byproduct of living most of his adult life in the fishbowl of modern fame, but it's hard to hide when you need a giant football field to really stretch out and launch rainbows. They picked a high school field in Brookline, Massachusetts, hoping to go mostly unnoticed. Someone captured one of their workouts on video, then slipped it to TMZ, offering us a glimpse into Brady's short stint in NFL exile. Guerrero watched as two men, at opposite ends of football's food chain, played catch in the September sun.

It is not luck, or accident, that Brady is the best 39-year-old quarterback of all time. What often feels mundane is actually the result of this kind of incalculable repetition. Even when forced to be away from the professional game for a month, Brady couldn't resist the comfort of the routine. Whether you view the man on that field in September as a cheat serving a long-deserved suspension, or a role model unfairly maligned in a league power struggle, the road to his record seventh Super Bowl began right there.