As I enter the gas station, a portly, middle-aged woman stands behind the counter. It’s the same long face I see every day when I’m buying gas or coffee, but never has she attempted to make small talk, only to give me my total and wish me well on my way as I’m about to leave.

Although her face is expressionless, today I can tell she’s about to burst.

“Did you hear the news,” she asks before I reach the register. I know the news she’s referring to, and she knows she need not even ask the question. It’s a few minutes past 11 a.m. and by this time everyone in Wisconsin has heard the news, and everyone has talked that news to death. Wives have called husbands on their way to work; grocery store clerks have talked endlessly about it to shoppers; and men in suits have gotten little accomplished because the office chatter has been consumed with it.

Brett Favre has retired, and so the mourning period has begun.

Those living in Wisconsin knew this news would arrive one day, but it’s a moment every soul has been dreading since rumors of his impending retirement began circulating a few seasons ago. No one predicted it would happen on this day, though, and probably not during this offseason.

Those whose path I cross on my way into town are sullen, standing a little less erect than normal. It’s Tuesday, and every corner of Wisconsin is deflated.

It might not be on par with the devastation brought on by tragedy, or worthy of the shock-size headlines that come with the assassination of a president, but Wisconsin men and women feel it just the same. And who can pass judgment on us for feeling this way?

We’ve lost our state’s most beloved treasure. He unified every resident in a way no politician could ever dream. He’s a hero … a legend … nope, he’s bigger than that. In London, in the mid-1960s, a fan famously painted on a wall, ‘Clapton is God’ — a reference to the British blues guitar hero of his generation. I’ve always understood it to be more of an artistic statement than a literal sentiment. In Wisconsin, though, Brett Favre is as close to a living god as the cheese-eating, beer-drinking populous will ever know — and we fully believe that.

We’ve witnessed every magnificent escape from the pocket, every broken played turned into a long gain, every desperation heave, every one of those beautiful and playful sideline smiles, and every one of his blunders. Most of us have seen every single one of those 275 games in which he has strapped on a Green Bay helmet for a meaningful game. How could we possibly have taken our eyes off of him since he came to the rescue that fateful afternoon in September of 1992?

I doubt there has been a more beloved sports figure in any other state in any other era. Favre — unlike a DiMaggio, Gretzky or Jordan — was truly an approachable and relatable superhero. He was never perfect, and we’ve known that since Day One when his first pass was batted back to him. He didn’t live on the pages of comic books like Superman, and his face never put him on the cover of GQ like Tom Brady. He’s the cliché, the guy you could be drinking beers with one evening, and then watching make play after play the next afternoon (the fact that there was some truth to that in Favre’s younger years only adds to his popularity around the state).

Wisconsinites are some of the most human Americans one can find. We eat too much red meat, we drink too much, and we work our fingers to the bone. And so, if ever there was the perfect folk hero to live among us, it must be Favre, who is so remarkably flawed and so magnanimously gifted that one can’t love but to accept the good with the bad. We’ve forgiven him often, and he makes us stand taller when he has done well.

Like us, he hunts live game in the beautiful Northern Woods, and shovels his own snow (or so we care to believe he does), and gets cheap thrills out of working the land, even if he does it more often at that ‘other’ home of his in down south. He’s one of us, and he has given us more joy than any sum of money could buy in a lifetime.

The lady at the bank says nothing as she processes my transaction, and so I ask her, ‘Gee, I suppose on a day like this you don’t get to talk much about the weather?’ She shakes her head, and informs me that she’d much rather be talking about below-zero temperatures and heavy snowfalls than what she has been talking to customers about all morning.

It’s a gloomy day in Wisconsin. It was sunny and beautiful the day before but the weather has now shifted, and no one in Wisconsin expects the sun to return for quite some time.

Mike Beacom is freelance pro and college football writer based out of Wisconsin.