Neither the New England Patriots nor Drew Bledsoe knew that he would be inches away from death’s door right when the 2001 season began. In March that year, the team had put their full faith in him, signing him for a 10-year, record-setting contract. Instead, that year ended up being his last with the team. All because of a gnarly injury that changed the course of his life, and the NFL, forever.

It’s September 2001, and the Patriots are taking on the New York Jets as their second game of the season. The Jets have a seven-point lead, with the score at 10-3. In the fourth quarter, with five-ish minutes left on the clock, Bledsoe has the ball. And he’s going for it. In the midst of his run, Jets linebacker Mo Lewis crashed into him and sent him to the ground. Bledsoe was lying down for a few seconds. But he stepped back in for one more series, and threw one more pass, before he was swapped with a then-unknown Tom Brady. Nobody knew that later that night, Bledsoe would be fighting for his life.

“On the way to the hospital, sitting there [I’m] bleeding out internally,” the former quarterback narrated on the Gerard vs Evil podcast. “My brother was looking at me, and all of a sudden, I just felt lights out, and he thought I was done.

“They got me to the hospital, put a tube on my chest and immediately started pumping blood out, recycling it and putting it back in. And when I first got there, they said I had over two litres of blood inside my chest cavity. And they think my size I probably have like a total of seven litres of blood in my body. So, over a quarter of my blood was just floating around in my chest cavity. I was bleeding out about a litre an hour.”

Drew Bledsoe was initially pulled out of the game because he’d also suffered a concussion. He was in the locker room, packing up his stuff after his brother suggested they leave and get some rest. But Bledsoe continued to complain about his shoulder. Dr Thomas Gill IV, who was a team physician at that time, thought it might have been an abdominal injury or a ruptured spleen. Soon, Bledsoe had begun breathing rapidly.

This condition is called a hemothorax, where blood starts gathering in the chest cavity. It is serious if the patient with a severe injury is not treated immediately. Gill told Fox News that Drew Bledsoe “could have died.” He was feeling better after the tube was inserted, but things were still “dicey.” Bledsoe was in the hospital for a few days. He did not know that he’d ushered in the arrival of the player who would go on to define the sport.

Tom Brady didn’t win this particular game. But he eventually locked the starting role for himself and established himself and the Patriots as the greatest entities in the league. Nobody thought this would be coming from a player who was drafted with the 199th overall pick in the 2000 draft.

“It was the loudest hit I could ever remember hearing,” Brady said in 2016, recalling this day. “Drew was so tough, and he got up and came to the sideline and his face mask was smashed. I saw and heard the hit, and it was a crushing hit.”

It wasn’t until mid-week when we knew the extent of what Drew was dealing with,” he added. “Again, I was just taking things as they came, and I tried to make the best of the situation, as it was tough for everybody, with somebody I respected so much, like I did Drew. Brady also says that it’s “hard” to forget this day, because it gave him his storied career. But it came at the cost of someone losing his life, and also fighting for his life in the hospital.

Anyone else in Drew Bledsoe’s place would have resented Tom Brady, even though the latter simply took what came his way. But Bledsoe selflessly became the bigger guy, and supported Brady and his team.

Drew Bledsoe on winning the Super Bowl under Tom Brady’s shadow

Because Brady gave the Patriots six Super Bowl wins, many often forget that Bledsoe himself came close to winning one in the 1996 season. It was his fourth year in the NFL, and he had racked up 4,068 passing yards that year. Bledsoe was meant to be the man who would eventually bring the team a Super Bowl win. However, when the Patriots won in 2001, Bledsoe was there only as a backup. He didn’t hold his team back from something that was working well without him.

“Took me a long time to put that ring on,” Bledsoe added. “I do take a lot of pride in that season because I could have blown it up. I was the leader of the team, captain, franchise guy. Could have been an a—–e and torn the whole thing down. Instead, I did right and supported my guys and supported Tom.

“I did get to play in the Championship game, which was good. But it was very bittersweet. … We won a championship, but I’m not the guy on the field. That hurt.”

Still, Drew Bledsoe is proud of that Super Bowl ring and brings it out now and then. But it was also the end of his Patriots career, as Tom Brady had cemented the fact that he would be QB1 for a good time now. Bledsoe eventually moved to the Buffalo Bills, where he earned Pro Bowl honours the next year. He retired in 2007 with the seventh-highest passing yard total at that time. Drew Bledsoe gave the NFL Tom Brady, but he is also the legend who never got to be one.