Impeccable exit

 So now Drew Brees walks away, and I'm seeing the kid with the plastic lobster again. The mind is a river, and it chooses its own course. This one is mine.

It twists and turns and fetches up in eddied pools, taking me back to a November day with all the light gone out of it. Darkness has fallen with a thud in Ross-Ade Stadium, as it tends to do in November in Indiana. But the lights are blazing in Ross-Ade, and the field is stuffed with celebrating Purdues, and here comes this one kid waving a plastic lobster in the chilled evening air.

Between his teeth, there is a red rose. 

That will, weirdly, be my defining image of Drew Brees, who's not even part of it. Oh, he's somewhere in this crush, having just beaten Indiana to seal Purdue's only Rose Bowl berth in the last 55 years. In a few minutes I'll wade through the bodies to the south end zone, where the sports information folks have set up the Brees Box from which Drew addresses the media after every home game.

 He'll go on from this night to the Rose Bowl and then to the NFL draft and then to New Orleans as damaged goods, a quarterback with a wrecked shoulder who barely breaches 6-foot-1. San Diego didn't want him anymore. Miami turned up its nose at him. So he'll arrive in New Orleans, a city that was still damaged goods itself in the wake of Katrina.

Fifteen years later, his next stop is Canton. And he is as much a part of the fabric of New Orleans as the jazz and the beignets and the fleur-de-lis that adorns Brees's helmet.

On the football field he did what he could to lift his adopted city, taking the Saints to a Super Bowl title five years after Katrina and becoming the most prolific passer in NFL history. Off the field, he and his wife Brittany did even more, becoming civic pillars in a way few athletes and their wives are in a profession of itinerants.

But Brees  stayed, and when it came time to announce his retirement yesterday he had his four kids do it. It was sweet and endearing and as perfect as his throwing arm so often was, a throwing arm that wedged the football into impossible nooks and crannies when Brees was at his best. 

You can be 6-1 when you have a laser for an arm, and Brees did. At his best there was something almost surgical about it, and the numbers kept climbing and climbing and climbing.

Despite all that, oddly, you hardly ever hear Brees's name mentioned as one of the greatest quarterbacks in NFL history. You hear Brady and Peyton and Montana and maybe Elway or even Unitas for the old-school set, and then "Oh, yeah, and Brees." It's not quite a diss, but it is a damn curious phenomenon.

In any event, he'll be in Canton as soon as he's eligible, and we know that's coming as surely as we knew Sunday was coming. It was that look back over his shoulder after the loss to Tampa Bay two months ago that did it; there was something wistful and aching in it, and you knew, right then, it was the look a man wears when he's doing something for the last time.

For Brees, it was walking off the field in the Superdome that day. For the rest of us, it will be watching him carve up a helpless defense, or win a Super Bowl for a hurting city.

Or, a decade before that, compel some crazy college kid to wave a plastic lobster in the air on a chilly November night, a red rose clenched in his teeth.