You might be tempted to think that because I’m from Wisconsin I have no real sense of objectivity when it comes to Brett Favre and the Green Bay Packers. But you’d be wrong. To say that Favre is a football god is by no means any type of exaggeration. One of his rocket balls could drive nails through oak—no, through rock—from a hundred yards out. I’ve seen him get slammed into the frozen tundra so hard the impact carved out a miniature canyon. In fact I’m pretty sure I’ve seen him stagger (while entirely unconscious) the last ten steps to the bench after a particularly ugly hit. How he ever made it I’ll never know, but give him a couple of plays to recover and he’d be right back out on the field again. He never missed a start in over two hundred and fifty regular season games. That’s over sixteen years of professional football, of dragging himself out to the huddle no matter what body part got smashed up this time. The guy is my age, for God’s sake—right around thirty-eight—and I shudder daily at the thought of climbing three flights of stairs just to get to my office.

With that in mind, you’d think I could forgive him for retiring.

And I can… I guess. Reluctantly. It’s not easy. You have to understand. Brett Favre is crazy, albeit a different kind of crazy now than he was when he first started. When he was younger he was completely nuts. He’d throw into double and even triple coverage without breaking a sweat. I’ve seen him win games with Hail Mary passes that bounced off of the helmets of the defenders and into the hands of our guys. Feats such as that are how he earned the nickname “The Gunslinger.” Half of the time you couldn’t tell whether a reception was a miraculous accident or simply a case of him getting bored with the ease of throwing directly to the receivers. The other half of the time you didn’t care. You were jumping up and down in living rooms and bars all across Wisconsin with your friends—beer splashing out of the pitchers, nachos flying in all directions—because in the fourth quarter he finally stepped on the gas. I can remember an entire decade in which it seemed that the Pack was always trailing in the last five minutes of the game. But no matter. Ten point leads, twenty point leads… Favre could demolish them all. Five minutes was an eternity to that guy. It was an eternity to you, too, and your lungs. If you had to hold your breath any longer, they’d explode.

The thing I’m going to miss most about Brett Favre is his touchdown victory sprint. In the seconds that follow a score he will literally drop thirty years before your very eyes, and go from being thirty-eight to being eight again. It’s like watching a colt gallop around a corral, only this colt will jubilantly tackle his own receivers in the midst of the excitement. It’s almost more fun to watch him do the touchdown sprint than it is to watch him play.

But so what, you’re probably thinking. All NFL quarterbacks are like that. You don’t understand. It’s different with Favre. It’s different because if you saw the Packers-Raiders game back in December ’03, then you’ve seen the dark mirror of that jubilant energy. You understand what he’s been through.

I remember the game because Favre’s father had just died the day before. Favre was already in California, and decided to stay with his teammates and play the game. He said his dad would have wanted him to. If you read the newspapers the next day you would have seen the cold statistics… final score 41-7 in favor of the Packers. Favre threw for very nearly four hundred yards and four touchdown passes, accumulating a near perfect passer rating by halftime. He completed twenty-two of thirty attempts by the end of the game, squarely hitting twelve different receivers.

But the statistics don’t really do justice to the enormity of what actually happened out there. Favre was devastating in the opening half of that game. His precision, however, came at a price. In a way you could only understand that game if you had been watching Favre for years; the colt, the gunslinger, the football god. Favre in the ‘90s was full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes. With every Hail Mary pass he threw, he also threw the heart and the hope of every Wisconsinite watching up in the air along with the ball. He had us praying on a play-by-play basis. We loved him because he forced us to believe not only in him but also in our team and probably even in God again. Even if he was stoppable as a human being, and even often as a flesh and blood quarterback, you knew that no opposing team would ever make him quit trying to win—nothing would crush that resolute gung-ho energy.

In Oakland he was still crazy, but he was a grim sort of crazy. He still threw into double coverage, but this time you didn’t need to pray that he’d connect. And what’s more, you knew it immediately. That night he was unstoppable as a human being and as a flesh and blood quarterback. This is my opinion, and I could be wrong, but I don’t think he could bear to be human just then. His mind was nowhere else but on the ball and where he had to throw it—not on his wife’s battle with breast cancer, not on his recovery from painkiller addiction and a drinking problem, and probably not even on his father. If he let himself think about anything else he would have cracked. Thus he focused all of his enormous energy on becoming the Brett Favre we prayed for every time he threw an interception in dozens of games past: a machine of accuracy.

But as I said, he paid for it. He aged years during that game, and he was never quite the same from there on out. He never got that total focus completely back, and he never got his former wildness completely back. He was just as magical as he ever had been, and he commanded just as much hope and faith in Wisconsin as ever before. He was still “our” gunslinger, just as much as Green Bay has always been “our” team. But somehow, something was different. And it wasn’t long after that game that he began flirting more seriously with the idea of retirement.

I am going to miss Brett Favre. He wasn’t just a football player. He wasn’t just Green Bay’s quarterback. He is beyond legendary. He is beyond even awe.

To me, Brett Favre is football.