There wasn’t much football left for Tony Gonzalez. In late December 2013, with just one game separating him from retirement, the Falcons tight end found himself looking back more often than ahead. One drive home from the team’s training facility turned into an unexpected trip through 17 NFL seasons, eventually landing on the one that still lingered the most: Atlanta had reached the NFC Championship after the 2012 season, finishing just one win short of the Super Bowl.

Believing he still had one more run left in him after that near miss, Gonzalez postponed retirement and returned for the 2013 season. But Atlanta stumbled to a 4-12 finish, and after the season ended, Gonzalez finally walked away from football, convinced that chapter of his life was over. A few months later, during the 2014 offseason, Tom Brady called.

“Tom Brady called me up, said, come throw with me,” Tony Gonzalez said on The Rich Eisen Show. “And, he’s a friend of mine anyway, so I was like, Oh, yeah. I thought I was doing him a favor. We went out there to throw the ball around. I get there there’s nobody else there except me.

“And then at the end of it he was like, ‘Hey, you think you can still play?’ He gave me the pitch, but I obviously, I said no, which, looking back, it was probably the stupidest thing I ever did. Because I think they won the Super Bowl that year. But yeah, I had the chance. I did not take it.”

Gonzalez wasn’t the only one Brady’s Patriots were missing. And Brady wasn’t the only one making calls to Gonzalez either.

Gonzalez later said multiple teams reached out about a comeback during the 2014 season; he never named them, and by January 2015 he confirmed at least two had approached him directly. Each time, the answer stayed the same: no.

What he said yes to instead was a full rebuild of his post-football life, and it started almost immediately. Within weeks of retiring, CBS signed him on as an analyst for The NFL Today, not as a retirement hobby, but as a second career he prepared for with the same obsessiveness he’d brought to route-running. He later admitted to rehearsing his delivery alone, in front of mirrors and even in the shower, treating broadcasting like a skill to be drilled rather than a talent to be assumed.

Kansas City had taken Tony Gonzalez 13th overall back in the 1997 draft, and what followed was a successful 17-season stint. He suited up for 270 regular-season games and started in 254, split between the Chiefs and the Atlanta Falcons, becoming a 14-time Pro Bowler. By the time he hung it up, he owned the NFL records for tight ends in nearly every category: 1,325 catches, 15,127 receiving yards, 111 touchdowns, and 30 games with at least 100 yards receiving. His Kansas City numbers alone (916 receptions, 10,940 yards, 76 touchdowns) still stand as the best any Chiefs player has ever put up in those categories. When he retired, he did something few longtime NFL players do on purpose.

He stopped training like one. After 17 seasons built around absorbing collisions, Gonzalez deliberately scaled back: lighter weights, more reps, more basketball, less bulk. The goal was simply staying functional for the next 40 years, and he made peace with the fact that his body would shrink along with his workload. That shift fed into a broader interest in nutrition and long-term health he’d already been circling during his playing days; he’d spent his final season nudging teammate Roddy White toward better eating habits, convinced diet was as much a career-extender as any weight room. None of that means walking away was easy.

“The temptation would be there, but I don’t know what the gain would be,” Gonzalez told Newsday in 2014. “I’ve always wanted a ring. That’s been my main goal as a player over the last 15 years of my career. You’re really trying to get that ultimate goal.

“But I’d be a mercenary to come in and get a Super Bowl ring, play with a team for, what, six, seven weeks? And even if I got the ring, it wouldn’t be the same as going through the fight with the team from the beginning to the end.”

Moreover, Gonzalez was unusually candid about how unsettling retirement actually felt, at one point admitting it scared him. Football had been his identity since he was a kid, and for the first time he was left asking what came next and what he was even qualified to do outside of it. That vulnerability is worth sitting with, because it’s the missing piece connecting the Brady anecdote to everything around it.

Turning down a workout invitation is one thing when the outcome is unknown. It reads very differently once you know it would have ended in a ring. That’s hindsight talking, not regret over the decision itself, and Gonzalez, who’d caught 83 passes for 859 yards and eight touchdowns at age 37 in a lost season, clearly wasn’t a courtesy invite. Brady saw a player who could still help him win.

Had he known Brady’s offer would come by, he might have had a different perspective. And Gonzalez would probably have to settle for less time if he said yes, because the Patriots already had a solid tight end in Rob Gronkowski. But if he had said yes, Brady would have had two of the best tight ends of that time in his arsenal.