Deflate-gate was a case born of ignorance and lost through arrogance.

There was so much arrogance that Roger Goodell was sitting there in April – after New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft conceded defeat, two draft picks, a million bucks and incalculable prestige – and the commissioner still couldn't resist pushing for more.

View photos Roger Goodell leaves federal court in New York on Monday. (AP) More

A pound of Patriots flesh wasn't enough. He had to get one from Tom Brady too, and, now, after getting slapped around Thursday by U.S. District Court Judge Richard M. Berman, it's Goodell who is the one walking out of here wounded and Brady gliding into the season as some kind of unsuspended martyr.

Oh, Roger had it all in his hands back in May. Kraft magnanimously/foolishly dropped the threat of litigation for the good of the NFL. He accepted the Wells report as fact, indefinitely suspended two locker room attendants and was just going to hope time heals all reputations. It was a terrible move; one Kraft himself has admitted was a mistake and even apologized for.

All Goodell had to do was the gentlemanly thing, the thing Kraft expected, and that was make a global settlement offer that included dropping Brady's conclusion of guilt and four-game suspension. It would have quickly and effectively ended the quarterback's appeal and further discovery into the NFL's conduct in the case.

The NFL machine had won, beaten even the mighty Patriots in a battle that was more about public relations than the actual facts around whether the footballs were tampered with during the AFC championship game. Public perception had been flooded by false, yet highly prejudicial stories that the NFL refused to correct, a narrative that made it almost impossible for the Patriots to fight back.

The Wells report was still believed to be "independent" because at that point no one knew that the NFL's general counsel had actually edited it, meaning it wasn't independent at all. Rival owners, fans and players were united.

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Goodell was going down in history as the victor, refusing to play favorites even with his favorite owner. All those that were screaming about the flaws in the Wells report would have been dismissed with Pat the Patriot logoed tin foil hats.

Goodell's NFL, however, has the tact of a falling safe, a strange cowboy culture where it must push for every last drop of blood, no matter how imprudent it is to continue the battle.

This is how the whole thing started, after all.

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Troy Vincent, the NFL's executive vice president of football operations, didn't know anything about Ideal Gas Law back on Jan. 19. As such, the investigation into how footballs became deflated during the AFC championship game in January between the Patriots and the Indianapolis Colts began with the belief that any football measured that night below 12.5 PSI was a sign of purposeful cheating, rather than natural deflation. And any number that was well below 12.5 – say in the 11s – must therefore be the result of a big, grand conspiracy.

That belief framed everything else. New England was running a scheme and the NFL gumshoes would prove it.

Only once they learned otherwise, once they found out that a ball can, quite naturally, be measured at 11.5, or that protocol after that game had two pumps with varying measurements that made the entire experiment worthless, or noted that no one ever cared about ball inflation levels before this and the rulebook was indifferent, or thought hard after none of the equipment guys cracked, or when no firm evidence was uncovered, or when there was nothing tying Brady to the possible deflations that night, they should've backed down.

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