Not with a bang, but a whimper.

For some reason, I just had to be there.

He wasn't there, nor will he ever be again unless it's as an opponent. Hardly anyone else was there, either, as precautions against the COVID-19 pandemic were being fully enforced at Gillette Stadium, turning it into a ghost city within the town of Foxborough.

But it was entirely fitting. The skies were gray and misty and the surroundings had a post-apocalyptic look to them Tuesday, which scriptwriters would have chosen to illustrate the day that Tom Brady left the New England Patriots.

Brady made the announcement from afar, dropping four pages of farewell comments on Instagram (or perhaps "Snapface," as his former coach might be predisposed to call it) early Tuesday morning. There will be no press conference at Gillette Stadium, no hugs or handshakes (and not only because of the fear of infection). The only public acknowledgement of Brady's departure from the team for which he played for 20 seasons, and won six Super Bowls, will be in the city where he lands -- and as of this writing, that had yet to be revealed. (Update: Late Tuesday, word was that Brady and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers had reached a contract agreement.)

Tom Brady's image covered the end-zone

lighthouse after he was suspended to start

the 2016 season.

(Photo by Mark Farinella)

But I still had to be there.

Twenty years earlier, inside a wood-paneled "Stadium Club" that no longer exists, I asked the skinny young rookie from Michigan in a semi-private aside if he knew an Attleboro-bred basketball player who was just about to start an ill-fated career there. I knew that within the world of big-time college athletics there was very little likelihood that there would be cross-pollination between the football and men's basketball teams, but to my amazement, Brady actually admitted to knowing who Leland Anderson was.

"That's a note," I thought, and indeed, I added it to the tail end of the "notebook" story I wrote at the end of a day in which the media met all of the 2000 draft choices and priority free agents. It wasn't a big deal. Tom Brady was not supposed to be a big deal, just another low-round quarterback that might only serve as cannon-fodder in training camp amid the search for serviceable backups to Drew Bledsoe.

But soon enough, one realized that Brady had caught the eye of those whose job it was to evaluate talent. He was kept as the No. 4 quarterback on a 53-man roster, almost unheard-of today. He didn't contribute anything of consequence in that first year, rarely playing on Game Days, but he was watching and learning. And by the time the next training camp begin, it was readily apparent from the start that Brady had transformed himself into a challenger for the backup role, and he had clearly won it by camp's end.

Then, 2001. It's all a blur by now. The Jets game. Bledsoe hospitalized with a life-threatening blood vessel rupture. Brady taking over as starter. Keeping the job even when Bledsoe was healthy again -- although Bledsoe had one last moment of glory when he entered the AFC Championship Game in Pittsburgh just before halftime and steered the Patriots to the victory. And the Super Bowl win over the Rams in New Orleans -- just the first of nine Super Bowl appearances, and so meaningful in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

There is no need to list all of Brady's accomplishments here. Even the two major "cheating" scandals that dogged the Patriots during those 20 years will not tarnish Brady's glow when it comes time to make him a first-ballot Pro Football Hall of Fame selection five years after he finally decides to hang up the spikes. Most notably, an entire generation was born and reached adulthood knowing no other starting quarterback (Matt Cassel doesn't count) for the New England Patriots. They watched him grow from a system quarterback to an unquestioned field general. They watched him date movie and TV stars and then hit the jackpot with the world's highest-paid supermodel, to whom he was introduced after a game in San Diego (yeah, I was there) and has become his loving wife and the mother to two of his three children. Tom Brady's successes, on and off the field, became the vicarious experiences of New Englanders for two full decades.

And now, it's over.

On Tuesday, I strolled through the empty pavilion between the shuttered commercial concerns of Patriot Place and the Patriots' Hall of Fame, a walk I had taken thousands of times from 2002 through the first two months of the 2018 season (when my newspaper's new owners decided that an accomplished and knowledgeable pro football writer was a luxury it could no longer afford). I haven't been totally absent from the premises since then, thanks to the Associated Press, but it does feel different -- and it certainly will be far more different when the time comes to cluster around a guy wearing No. 4 as the starting quarterback.

I stopped at the blue steel fence and gate that leads to the media workroom and the field, and texted a friend I knew would be inside. Lisa Edwards, a field producer for the NFL Network, was spearheading the network's coverage of the breaking news along with her reporting crew, and I was fortunate to catch her during a break between live remote telecasts.

She came out of the workroom and we stood on opposite sides of the fence, at least 6 feet apart in full accordance with present CDC guidelines. "Plus there's the force field between us," I joked, referring to the standing orders of the security crew to keep the rabble away from the football field.

Former Patriots' quarterback Tom Brady

gives a post-game press conference.

We chatted for about 10 minutes on a variety of topics, not the least of which were the absolutely eerie surroundings of a stadium practically in lockdown. Edwards' crew was presently the only media allowed within the building, while other broadcast crews were relegated to a corner of the parking lots several hundred feet away. That made it even more difficult to fathom that Brady's tenure with the Patriots had ended. An invisible virus, which has stoked fear in the hearts of millions of Americans, proved the only thing capable of making another apocalyptic event take a distant second place in the media's eye.

We said our farewells and wished each other well, and I started the stroll back to my car. I looked up at the faux lighthouse that loomed above us, and recalled how, at the start of Brady's four-game Deflategate suspension to start the 2016 season, the team draped it with a full-length photo reproduction of Brady in uniform, shouting defiantly. It was regarded as a little too arrogant for the NFL's tastes and removed, but that's what Brady was to the Patriots and their fans -- larger than life, and possibly even above the law.

I noticed that the Pro Shop was closed, so the 70-percent-off sale of No. 12 jerseys will have to wait for some time before it can begin. One or two other brave souls were also on site, probably also in search of some sort of higher understanding of the events taking place. I then drove past the TB12 training facility on my way back to US 1, and I wondered how long it would take for that to be vacated -- and whether the end of the Brady era might also signal an end to the relevance of Patriot Place. Time will tell.

Truth be told, this day was almost overdue.

Brady's departure was going to happen eventually. As he will be 43 years old this August, it's absolutely amazing that he was able to play at all for so long, let alone still lead his team to a Super Bowl championship in his next-to-last season as a Patriot. Any decline in his play last season, while apparent, could also be explained away as a failure on the part of his team to get him the offensive weapons he needed and the protection along the line to minimize whatever regression was in progress.

But if I'm Bill Belichick -- and I'm not -- I'd be thinking about how the window was closing to rebuild the team without Brady's continued presence becoming a hindrance. The Brady situation was threatening to become the football equivalent of Larry Bird, Robert Parish and Kevin McHale, whom the Celtics kept far past the point of no return. Yes, they were beloved by fans throughout New England, and yes, they had become iconic players among others that played for that storied franchise, but their continued presence in a salary-cap era hamstrung the Celtics in their efforts to rebuild, and that lasted for almost as long as Brady played for the Patriots.

No, the time had come for the Patriots to move on. No one ever said it would be easy.

In a perfect world, Brady would have won another Super Bowl and scheduled his farewell press conference a week later, leaving with the distinction of being a Patriot for life.

Instead, it will be remembered that Brady's last pass for the Patriots was a pick-six interception in a playoff loss. It wasn't exactly Willie Mays out at the plate for the Mets; that will be reserved for the fans of some other team, who will probably feel at some point that they were sold a bill of goods when he swapped the Flying Elvis for their logo.

It shouldn't have been allowed to happen that way. But this is not on Robert and Jonathan Kraft or Bill Belichick. The decision was Brady's.

I still had to be there, though. It looked, and felt, exactly as I thought it should.