The investigation into the theft at Super Bowl LI continued Wednesday without a break in the case.
Three full days and still no one knows who, midway through the third quarter Sunday, stole the Atlanta Falcons.
OK, so the real alleged crime involves the jersey of Tom Brady being taken at some point after the game.
As terrible as that development was, things could have been worse. Brady, for instance, still could have been inside the jersey.
I’m not sure of the punishment in Texas for Grand Theft Quarterback. But I am certain that it’s not as bad as what the QB-swiping culprit could have been facing, namely, the wrath of Bill Belichick.
Sorry, it’s just difficult to take too seriously a story that, more than anything, is sad and pathetic.
Sad that someone would sink so low as to lift in mid-celebration another man’s cherished personal possession.
Pathetic that we live in a world where another man’s cherished personal possession has a street value estimated at $500,000.
That’s the figure one memorabilia expert shared with the New York Post, as comical and eye-catching as anything published by the Post this week.
That includes the newspaper’s headline following New England’s victory over Atlanta in the aftermath of Deflategate: “Cheat Your Heart Out!”
I most definitely am not a collectibles-type of person. I don’t have a retro jersey, a single bobblehead doll or a calf tattoo of Ernest Hemingway or any other literary giant. I don’t believe I own anything that bears an autograph.
So I don’t get it. Not. At. All.
I don’t understand why anyone other than Tom Brady would want Tom Brady’s jersey. And I mean for free, never mind for half a million dollars.
What are you going to do with it, anyway? Hang it on your bedroom wall, like some “Charlie’s Angels” poster? Display it in your office, along with your college diploma, like something you achieved?
If you want a conversation starter, mount one of those singing fishes behind your desk. If you want to make your office feel more cozy, mount an actual fish back there.
There is no dollar figure that can be attached to Brady’s jersey because it’s priceless. Priceless, at least, to one person: The man who wore it while winning his record fifth Super Bowl.
And to all the rest of us who haven’t quarterbacked our team to five NFL titles? The jersey, rather than priceless, should be pointless.
I’ll admit it could be argued that its value is astronomical. But that value is solely sentimental and belongs only to Brady, his DNA literally seeping as sweat into the very fabric of the jersey.
And not to get too technical here or anything, but, as I understand the rules, the jersey really belongs to the NFL and the Patriots, who, presumably, would allow Brady to keep it as a memento.
Again, I don’t even remotely feel the attraction that pulls other people wallet-first into the mystical realm of sports collectibles. And those folks are, of course, at this moment rolling their eyes at ridiculous me.
But I simply cannot comprehend why anyone would pay $4.3 million for James Naismith’s original rules of basketball like a man named David Booth did in 2010.
Now, as a modern-day NBA fan, I would be willing to put up, say, a quarter to see exactly how Naismith originally defined traveling. But that’s about as far as I would go.
Yet, this is the NFL and this is the Super Bowl and these are the Patriots. So Brady’s missing jersey is being treated in much the same way as his kidneys would be had they been stolen postgame.
Along with the Houston police department’s Major Offenders division, the Texas Rangers, the NFL’s security department and NRG Stadium personnel are investigating.
Crime Stoppers of Houston is offering a reward for information leading to an arrest. Much like Atlanta’s coaching staff, officials have reviewed hours of videotape from Sunday trying to see what went wrong.
Thankfully, Houston police chief Art Acevedo finally spoke from a more rational place recently when he said that, along with jersey theft, the alleged crimes in the area during Super Bowl LI included three homicides.
“It’s just not the biggest, greatest importance in the big scheme of things,” Acevedo said. Then, speaking of his message to his officers, he said he told them, “We’ll give it a run, but let’s keep things in perspective. It’s a jersey.”
It is a jersey, just a jersey. And it doesn’t even belong to us. It belongs to Tom Brady, sort of, its value impossible to determine, regardless of the number of zeroes involved.
In fact, the price of such things was once famously set at a very reasonable sum. If I’m remembering the TV commercial correctly, the cost was one kid’s bottle of Coca-Cola.
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