I am happy for Deanna, Brittany, Breleigh and Brett Favre.

Once the dust settles, their lives will be their own and the girls will have their husband and dad all to themselves for the first time in their lives, a gift they’ve certainly earned, as generous as they’ve been sharing him with the rest of us these last 17 seasons. But for just a day or two, I mourn for all of us who love the NFL.

Perhaps our greatest gift over the past two decades, maybe even throughout the history of the game, has been watching No. 4 play football and now that gift is gone. 

Personally, I’ve been blessed with a front-row seat to the passion play that was Brett Favre, quarterback. As I wrote a few years back, I believe Favre was the greatest player I’ve ever seen and arguably the greatest to ever play the game.

There are many of us in the national media who cover the game, most far better at putting pen to paper than yours truly, who share the privilege of having covered Favre’s entire career. But as some of you know, I had a gig on the side from 1985 to 2004 as a member of the Chicago Bears’ Radio Network broadcast crew and called every one of their games as color commentator from 1987 through 2004. On 26 occasions, I spent 8-12 hours per week at night studying his body of work to prepare for an upcoming Bears-Packers broadcast, and then all day Sunday (or Monday night) trying to paint the verbal picture of the masterpieces he created on the field.

Perhaps my view is a bit colored by the fact that Favre owned the Bears thoughout a good portion of that span, going 21-5 against them, including a 10-game winning streak and a 19-3 record after splitting his first four starts against them. But the Bears are not the only team that Favre owned and it wasn’t the wins or the unwieldy stats he piled up that put the exclamation point on his greatness — it was the pure joy and childlike wonder at the privilege of playing the game he brought to every single canvas he worked on.

In 30-plus years of covering this game, I’ve never seen a player other than Favre celebrate the joy of playing the game in front of all who chose to watch the way he did. I’ve never seen a man play harder, compete more fiercely or display more toughness than he did. In short, there has never been a player that made me feel better about the game or admire its beauty more than he did.

And, of course, there are the numbers.

He is the only man in the history of the game to win three MVP Awards and the fact that he won them consecutively clearly speaks to how he dominated the game in the mid-1990s. Favre’s 442 TD passes, 61,655 passing yards, 160 wins at the QB position and 288 interceptions are just a small sampling of the all-time NFL records he holds.

Where do the 288 picks fit into the picture? Who in the history of the game has shown his vulnerability more and rebounded from adversity more spectacularly than Favre?

The man shared his passions, foibles and triumphs off the field with us as well, and was as much of a hero in life as he was in football. As the MVP awards were piling up and it all seemed to be coming so easily to the younger, brasher Favre, there was no party he couldn’t enjoy or excess he couldn’t handle. But when it became clear that he wasn’t Superman and his addictions to painkillers and then alcohol had taken hold of his life, he stood proud in the spotlight and said he had been wrong and beat his dependencies as if they were just another defensive back put there for him to conquer.

At times during Favre’s career, one couldn’t help but feel like the proud parent watching their own son or daughter growing and flowering before our very eyes.

The more mature and veteran Favre continued to share his own family’s trials and traumas with us all as siblings faced their own errors in judgment, the sudden and heart-wrenching loss of his father and Deanna’s own heroic battle with breast cancer. If, indeed, Superman has ever traded in the tights and cape for a jersey and pads, his real name was Brett Favre, not Clark Kent.

Back on the field, there is the one number that, to me, stands above all others.

If, in fact, Favre doesn’t change his mind and the Packers open the 2008 season with someone else as their starting quarterback, it will snap a streak of 275 consecutive regular-season and playoff games that Favre has started. Talk about Cal Ripken and Lou Gehrig all you want because they deserve it and their streaks were mind-boggling, but they don’t compare to 275 straight games of being a human target for the biggest, strongest, fastest and toughest weapons that any sport has ever seen.

Many are already suggesting this isn’t really it, that given a few months of rest and relaxation in Mississippi, Favre’s juices will flow again and he’ll be back in green and gold. But as much as I didn’t see this coming off the remarkable ’07 season that Favre produced at the age of 38, I now suspect this really is it. The clues were there and we just didn’t want to see them.

Ask yourself this — at any time during the Packers’ NFC title-game defeat at frigid Lambeau Field did Favre look comfortable to you? Did he look happy or where he wanted to be? It was the one thing that bothered me about that game from the opening whistle. The childlike joy he had displayed the previous week in a rollicking win over the Seahawks in the divisional round was missing, and I suspect as Favre has wrestled with the future over these past few weeks that it was that reality that brought him to this point. There is really nothing left for him to accomplish, absolutely nothing to prove … so why pay the price if there’s no payoff in return?

History has to write itself. But years from now, when our kids, grandkids and great grandkids gather to talk about those very few sports heroes who actually obtained an aura of mythical proportions they’ll remember Babe Ruth, Sandy Koufax, Red “The Galloping Ghost” Grange, Jim Brown, “Wilt the Stilt” Chamberlain, Michael Jordan, Muhammad Ali, Gordie Howe, Wayne Gretzky and I’m sure a few others. And I believe one of them will be No. 4.

We have been truly blessed by his presence, and so, what is there left to do but to wish him the best, and say thanks?