"Even at the end, his heart was bigger than his head.

Tedy Bruschi has always been two people. On the one hand he understood he had been an underdog most of his football life, an undersized guy with a need to prove people wrong. On the other, he was always a smart guy who understood that perception is never reality. Only reality is reality.

This summer he grew to learn the reality for him now was that at 36 his body was deserting him, as it does all the warriors in the arena. For some it happens quickly, for others it takes time. But none avoid the only undefeated force on earth - the passage of time - forever.

At some point after Friday night's preseason game against the Washington Redskins it became clear to him that time had done what faithless doubters, fierce opponents and even a stroke could not. It had made clear to him that it was time to stop playing a game that has been his life since he first discovered it as a kid with dreams in northern California who everyone kept saying was too small to be doing what he was doing.

Yet when he finally accepted what he never had before and walked away from football, neither time nor the game had defeated him. He'd done what he wanted, proved his point and, most of all, played the way he wanted to play - like a man giving a full day's work for a full day's pay.

Maybe that's one of the reasons New England loved him so. Obviously, he evolved from a college pass rusher to a starting NFL linebacker and, finally, into not only a playmaker but the maker, it always seemed, of the biggest plays at the biggest moments. There is much to love in that alone if you are a Patriots fan.

He seemed uncannily able to make not only the physical plays but also the intelligent ones that led his favorite coach, Bill Belichick, to call him "the perfect player" yesterday as he took his leave from professional football and became a civilian for the first time since he was a kid in Roseville, Calif., dreaming a dream that would swell to a size not even he could have imagined.

But there was more to the love affair between Tedy Bruschi and New England than that. There was a connection that is reserved for very few. Not simply for the best player on the field, which he often was, but for the one they feel would build a stone wall in Vermont the right way, even in February, or pull fish from the sea off Gloucester, not just in summer but when you had to chip ice off the boat to get the catch on board.

"When you come into this facility there's a sign," Bruschi said. "It says 'Do Your Job.' Well, I did my job for 13 years. My job is done."

In the long history of pro football there may have been players who did the job better because they were faster or bigger or more gifted, but none did it with more hard work, thought or devotion. And none did it with more passion, which, in the end, will always be what defines him here.

"Sunday was an explosion of passion for me," Bruschi said.

There were so many memories of that passion. There was the interception in 2003 against Miami that led to the spontaneous explosion of delirious fans throwing snow into the sky on one of the worst winter days in our history. And there was Bruschi rolling on the field 3 hours before Super Bowl XXXIX in sun-dappled Jacksonville, Fla., with his two boys, a father like the rest of us playing in the park.

Tedy Bruschi was, above all else, Everyman not Superman. He was what you wanted to be on the job and in the family room. He was present.

"I made sure when I was on the team that I took advantage of that opportunity now!" Bruschi said when asked how he could seemingly walk away so easily now that it was over. "Over my career I worked so hard to make this a celebration. The one word I found myself using with my teammates was 'fulfilled.'

"A feeling that I did everything I set out to do. I had the highest of highs and the lowest of lows."

The highs were obvious. So was the low, the 2005 stroke that seemed it would force this day far sooner than anticipated. In his mind he was retired the moment the doctors said "stroke." That was even his perception. Once again it was not his reality."