Tom Brady Sounds Ready to Resume Dominating Rest of NFL

For all you chumps who enjoyed a Tom Brady-less 2008 New England Patriots team, I got some bad news for you: Dreamboat is back. And to hear Peter King write it (in between uncontrollable sobs of joy, surely), Tommy Terrific is better, faster, stronger, so on and so forth.

Last September, Brady's season ended after just 15 plays. The Chiefs' Bernard Pollard tackled him low and blew up his ACL in the process. Following knee surgery (and a couple subsequent procedures to deal with a staph infection), Brady spent the last seven months planning a marriage and plotting his comeback.

With the nuptials out of the way, he's now focused on his full-time gig as the Patriots quarterback. Two seasons ago, he was the centerpiece of the league's most explosive offense. And while Josh McDaniels and Bill Belichick did a swell job of making do with Matt Cassel last year (And I mean that in the best way possible; Cassel went 11-5 after not starting an organized tackle football game in nine years -- that's impressive.), there's a good chance, even with that slow, aging defense, that the Patriots would've won 32 consecutive regular-season games.

Instead, they settled for 11 and missed the playoffs for the first time since 2002. Now, fully healthy and looking forward to training camp two-a-days, Brady sounds like a guy with something to prove. Of course, everybody sounds like that in May, but it's not like he didn't spent the first half of his career proving people wrong.

You may have heard mention of his journey from skinny University of Michigan part-timer to three-time Super Bowl champ -- by way of the sixth round of the 2000 draft! It'll no doubt be made into a major motion picture (Leo DiCaprio is the obvious choice although I'm holding out for Michael Cera. No idea why. It just feels right.) and added to the Bible as the "forgotten gospel." (Because that's what Jesus would do.)

But the knee injury -- the first serious setback of his NFL career -- gave him plenty of time to think. Via King:

He was convincing when he said he was "as confident as anyone could be that I'll be ready to play, back to playing normally, when the seasons starts. I've done everything I could to push myself, sometimes too hard. Right now, I'm doing everything. Literally everything. There's nothing I can't do."

With his voice rising as he leaned forward in his chair, Brady said that playing 10 more seasons "is a big goal of mine, a very big goal. I want to play until I'm 41. And if I get to that point and still feel good, I'll keep playing. I mean, what the hell else am I going to do? I don't like anything else.

"People say, 'What will you do if you don't play football?' Why would I even think of doing anything else? What would I do instead of run out in front of 80,000 people and command 52 guys and be around guys I consider brothers and be one of the real gladiators? Why would I ever want to do anything else? It's so hard to think of anything that would match what I do: Fly to the moon? Jump out of planes? Bungee-jump off cliffs? None of that s--- matters to me. I want to play this game I love, be with my wife and son, and enjoy life."

I'm definitely look forward to hearing Cera make that speech in the movie. In the meantime, Brady sounds like Tony Robbins and the season is still three months off. Monday, Randy Moss and Wes Welker said this Pats offense could be better than the record-setting 2007 version. You know, the one that hung 37 points a game on opponents during the regular season.

No idea if Brady will be able to keep it going another 10 years, but for now, the rest of the league isn't worried about 2018. They're worried about 2009. And Lord help us all if Brady's anywhere close to the player he was in 2007. On the upside, with Brett Favre retired (for the moment, anyway), Peter King's Monday Morning Quarterback columns will write themselves.