Maybe this is just one person seeing what he wants to see. Maybe this is the networks and the league coalescing around a social media strategy hellbent on exclusively pumping positive content of Aaron Rodgers hugging people from his past. But I left Sunday’s Steelers meltdown, a 35–25 loss to the Packers, with a strange peacefulness regarding Aaron Rodgers that I’ve not felt—and, I wonder if he has not felt—in almost half a decade. Certainly, the same can be said about the team that let him go three seasons ago and the quarterback who replaced him and set an absurd franchise record for consecutive completions in his first matchup against his former teammate.
You normally hate those people who insist that life has a tendency of working out—clearly born before the advent of A.I.—but in this specific case, it has. Before our eyes, we’re getting the chance to see a fitting, non-embarrassing, socially digestible career finale for one of the game’s all-time great players, which, I’ll insist, could not have happened anywhere else. Especially in Green Bay. I believe it was Tom Brady Sr. who once wisely said that there’s no way for it to end well. But Rodgers seems to be challenging that narrative, even on an imperfect Pittsburgh roster that, by the week, is showing its deleterious levels of maturity and lack of team speed, but will still inevitably hold on for a bow-out playoff game.
In fact, the wayward nature of Rodgers’s post-Packers journey ensured that it could end well. I don’t know if he’s the kind of person capable of being broken down, but anyone who survives the Jets at their absolute worst—much like a person whose home has been torched or identity stolen—tends to gain a very elemental appreciation for life’s simple pleasures. In Rodgers’s case, merely the ability to be one drop of water in a flowing stream. A team that makes it impossible for him to reach for his worst and most destructible impulses. You know, the ones that defined his end in Green Bay.
I challenge you all to think back at the end of the Rodgers–Mike McCarthy era, or the Rodgers–Matt LaFleur era. The passive aggression at every press conference, every instance between snaps, every tedious mid-week television appearance, hung in the air like a kind of omnipresent fog. And while Rodgers would undoubtedly still be doing incredible, theatrical, mind-bending feats with the football, it was a bit like watching The Dark Knight after having a bad hang with Bruce Wayne (just ask poor Harvey Dent, who was so earnestly excited about getting that reservation). The viewer is so acutely aware of the imperfect, combustible nature of it all that it limits the potential for joy.
On Sunday, Rodgers was either ideally, deliriously lost in the football game, like when he spiked the ball to the turf for an incomplete pass a nanosecond before hitting the turf or was so incensed about a blatantly missed offside call that he nearly convinced the officials to throw a flag post-caucus, or he was—again, my read—just enjoying the idea of eluding someone like Micah Parsons. As someone nearing 40 myself, those little golden moments of still-got-it athleticism are held onto like priceless family heirlooms.
After the game, he was perfectly complimentary of Jordan Love multiple times. He revealed, in a nod to Packer fans, that the opposition was so loud that he had to use silent snap counts at home.
In short, Rodgers sounded like a quarterback whose edges have been sanded. A future broadcaster. A pitch man for insurance and golf clubs and potato chips. I had hoped Pittsburgh would not change him, because we should all be who we are, but facilitate the existence of a Rodgers that doesn’t have to feel so slighted, or untrusting, or passive-aggressive like he did in Green Bay.
And, on a similar level, Green Bay was immersed in everything it was allowed to become after the departure of Rodgers. Amoebic on both sides of the ball. Balanced, to some extent, financially. Uninhibited by the walking-on-eggshells lifestyle of a small-town team trying to appease a player who had become bigger than everything else in rural Wisconsin. Run-heavy when it suits them. In position to make gigantic, franchise-altering trades. A developmental roster through and through.
There is an alternate universe where, like the Steelers not so long ago with Ben Roethlisberger, Green Bay is merely gritting teeth, waiting for the old man to decide it's time to go.
It’s important in moments like these to see through the wins and the losses. In letting go of Rodgers, Green Bay envisioned doing something it could clearly no longer conceive of with Rodgers: become deep enough, multifaceted enough, young enough, free enough and, sure, uncynical enough to build a roster that could legitimately contend for the Super Bowl.
Mission accomplished, so far. Sitting atop the NFC at 5-1-1, with the Panthers coming to town a week from now, is about as good as it gets.
In coming to Pittsburgh, Rodgers, whether he would like to admit it or not, wanted a high-floor proposition that would allow him to bow out sans a sour taste in his mouth. In watching the man at the podium Sunday night and remembering the one many lifetimes ago, I would say mission accomplished as well.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Even in a Loss, Pittsburgh Is the Best Place for Aaron Rodgers.