FOXBOROUGH, Mass. — Jacoby Brissett hasn’t been in this locker room in two years now, been gone almost twice as long as the time he spent here, deep in the bowels of Gillette Stadium.

Brissett was a rookie on a deep, experienced roster then, a newcomer to a locker room with a lot of battle-tested veterans and a clear hierarchy, a surprising third-round pick thrown into a meeting room with a legend and the most famous backup quarterback in the league.

A footnote, albeit an important one, in the conclusion of the Deflategate story that dominated the NFL airwaves for two full years

Brissett was no footnote in here. Not in this locker room.

Walk up to any Patriot who was here when Brissett played in New England. Mention his name. The reaction’s the same every time.

“That was a good guy,” Patriots guard Shaq Mason said, a smile splashing across his face. “That’s one of my closest guys even now. We still stay in touch.”

Brissett’s magnetism, his ability to connect with just about anybody on the roster, has become his defining quality in Indianapolis, the trait that has the Colts believing he can step into Andrew Luck’s starting spot and take the team where it wants to go.

He had it in New England. He’s always had it.

His calling card.

“His infectious personality,” long-time Patriots special-teams ace Matthew Slater said. “Anyone who was around him immediately got a boost, immediately was smiling, laughing, having a good time.”

'He's just himself'

Devin McCourty’s been in New England for nine years now, a steady, secure presence at the back of an ever-changing cast of characters, the longest-tenured Patriot on the defensive side of the ball.

A lot of rookies, a lot of newcomers have walked through those doors.

Only a few have been comfortable as instantly as Brissett.

“He’s cracking jokes, he’s not trying to (act like) a prototypical quarterback role,” McCourty said. “He’s just himself.”

McCourty, then a 29-year-old safety, loved Brissett’s personality, liked the way he’d line up on the scout team and talk trash to a secondary full of veterans, guys with skins on the wall. Brissett started hanging out with McCourty and Duron Harmon, another veteran safety, on his off days; he’d go to dinner with the two older players and their wives, hang out at their houses.

The veteran safeties weren’t the only ones.

Brissett bonded with everybody. The fun-loving, trash-talking life of the locker room had depth, too. A third-round pick, Brissett spent a lot of his practice time lined up behind sixth-round center Ted Karras, a Cathedral product who was also thrown into the fire as a rookie.

Karras liked Brissett from the start, saw the Patriots’ third-string rookie quarterback start to take on a leadership role by the way he bonded with people off the field.

“We had personal relationships,” Karras said. “For me, that’s already being a leader, when your quarterback knows everyone in the huddle, knows their story. He’s a great guy; really funny, really smart, I always thought. We had great conversations.”

Brissett even bonded with the walking, talking legend in the Patriots locker room, brought out a side of Tom Brady that isn’t always easy to see. Then 38, heading into 39, Brady had long been a larger-than-life figure in New England, a man who didn’t seem to have much in common with a 23-year-old quarterback, at least at first glance.

But Slater saw a key commonality between the two, something that bridged the generational gap quickly.

“Jacoby always carried himself with a great deal of humility, and it made him very approachable, it made him very likeable, especially from a veteran perspective,” Slater said. “It really makes sense that the Wolf Pack would be born during that season.”

The Wolf Pack. #BloodBrothers. The Three Musketeers.

Brady, Brissett and Jimmy Garoppolo, the three quarterbacks on the Patriots roster, were inseparable that season. Laughing and joking in the locker room, snapping pictures for Instagram and Twitter together.

Did Brissett help loosen Brady up?

Brady was the one who called the other two his Wolf Pack, channeling the oddball speech from Zach Galifianakis’ character in "The Hangover" to describe his relationship with Garoppolo and Brissett after the Patriots won the AFC Championship Game, posting it on his Instagram feed under a photo of the three quarterbacks together.

Two weeks later, Brissett showed up at NRG Stadium in Houston for Super Bowl LI wearing a Wolf Pack T-shirt, the picture from Brady’s Instagram covering his body from the shoulders to the waist.

Brady, who wasn’t available for an interview in New England this week, clearly still loves Brissett.

When Brissett was tweeting out deep thoughts this summer — a sample: “Which part of the pig’s skin is actually a football?” — Brady tweeted back, asking Brissett if they needed to start a podcast together. Brissett likes to poke a little at Brady on Instagram, telling Brady “Not much has changed” when the quarterback referenced his famously underwhelming Combine photo in April. The Wolf Pack got back together in May for the Kentucky Derby.

Brady’s not always like this, not always as loose and lively as he was that season, when the Wolf Pack was tearing through the Patriots locker room.

The prevailing theory in New England is that Brissett brought it out of him.

“I think maybe he made Tom feel young again,” McCourty said.

Everywhere Brissett went, people followed

Brissett has always been like this, always had the kind of magnetic personality that draws people to him like the Millennium Falcon caught in the Death Star’s tractor beam.

Charlie Weis called him the Pied Piper.

The first time Weis made the trip down to Palm Beach Gardens to recruit Brissett, convince him to leave Miami behind and come to Florida, it was the middle of basketball season. Brissett wasn’t the best player on the team; a good, talented player, to be sure, on a team that would win the state title the next year, but he wasn’t the best.

But everyone gravitated to Brissett.

The next time Weis went to Palm Beach Gardens, he went to the school — a school with a dozen gifted athletes — and he saw the same thing. In class, in the coaches’ office, on the practice field. Everywhere Brissett went, people followed.

“The first quality that I look for in a quarterback, more than anything else, is does he have that Pied Piper in him? Does he have that quality that people gravitate toward him?” Weis said. “It’s easy for people to say well, we helped develop this guy, but really at the end of the day, the it factor is something you either have or you don’t have.”

Nyheim Hines saw it later, long after Brissett had gone to Florida, then lost Weis and his pro-style offense to Kansas after the first year, and transferred to North Carolina State and started playing like a future NFL prospect.

Stories about Brissett’s leadership were had already started seeping out in Raleigh, Hines’ hometown. How Brissett, unable to travel with the team during his transfer season, drove himself to away games. How he’d write letters to his offensive teammates before every game.

Hines was a recruit at the time. He’d just committed.

Brissett asked Hines if he had any gloves and cleats; he wanted to throw to the new recruit. Hines didn’t have his cleats with him. Brissett ended up lending him a pair, the 6-4 quarterback somehow wearing the same size as the 5-8 receiver.

“He told me I had a real big foot to be so short,” Hines said.

Brissett, the kind of guy who knows exactly how to pick on his friends and somehow make it endearing, had found his Hines joke. He's tell Hines for the rest of the 2015 season that he couldn’t see him running routes across the formation.

But he also let the newest member of the Wolfpack — the North Carolina State variety, not the trio Brady would coin later — know there was a standard he had to meet.

“I just remember the detail about him,” Hines said. “The route’s at 5 yards, I’d end at 4, he’d be like ‘Too short. Come back.’ That’s the first day I met Jacoby.”

Brissett under pressure

New England drafted Brissett into the middle of a firestorm. Brady was facing a four-game suspension for Deflategate; the Patriots used a third-round pick on Brissett, buying themselves some insurance and a potential heir to Garoppolo’s role as backup.

The rookie wasn’t supposed to start, wasn’t supposed to play at all. Not on a team with Garoppolo, a backup the Patriots already loved. With Brady suspended, Garoppolo was supposed to get a four-game audition for the rest of the NFL and then turn it back over to the legend.

Then Garoppolo went down, spraining the AC joint in his shoulder in the first half of the second game of the season.

Brissett, the rookie, had to take over for a team with Super Bowl ambitions.

“We had all the trust in him that we could go out there and win a football game with him,” McCourty said. “I think that speaks volumes on how he prepares and gets himself ready to go.”

The discipline, the attention to detail Hines had seen at North Carolina State had only grown stronger in a training camp spent watching Brady, the famously competitive, exacting leader in New England.

Brissett had built a relationship with the Patriots through his personality andsense of humor, his interest in his teammates. .

He had earned his leadership role on the field.

Brissett took over for Garoppolo and finished off a win over the Dolphins, then had to start the next two games to get the Patriots to Brady’s eventual return.

“We’re playing a Thursday night game against Houston, it’s the third game of the year,” Slater said. “It was immediately after that game, he had the respect of everybody in this building, if he didn’t have it already.”

Brissett was far from brilliant. He completed 11 of 19 passes for 103 yards, rushed for 48 yards on eight carries, scampered for a 27-yard touchdown, held down the fort while the Patriots’ defense suffocated the Texans in a shutout.

But he also showed he had the salt to play on a Super Bowl team.

Brissett tore a ligament in his thumb in that game, leaving the Patriots staring at the possibility of playing wide receiver Julian Edelman as an emergency quarterback.

The rookie stayed in, kept battling, played the next week in a losing cause to the Buffalo Bills.

The Wolf Pack had done its job. Brissett had gotten the ball back to Brady.

Brissett's takes reins already a leader

McCourty still loves Brissett, talks to him quite a bit. For the most part, they talk about life, not football, the same way Brissett became such an integral part of the Patriots locker room so many years ago. They take playful shots at each other, give each other a hard time.

Every once in a while, the veteran safety lets the young quarterback know he still has big expectations for him. Back in January, McCourty saw a video on ESPN’s NFL Sunday Countdown, a compilation of Brady’s backups talking about what it was like to play behind the legend.

“I told him, ‘Don’t ever let me see you do a video with a bunch of backups,’” McCourty said. “That’s not your goal in life.”

Brissett’s time was supposed to come next season, after another year playing with Andrew Luck — another great quarterback who loves Brissett dearly and calls him a lifelong friend. Next season, Brissett would have a chance to make some other team his own.

But the chance is coming now, right now, in the middle of another firestorm, an avalanche of emotion brought on by Luck’s shocking decision to retire at 29. When a backup takes over for a superstar, there are always questions about stepping into the captain’s chair, about taking over the leadership role that comes with being a starting quarterback.

Brissett doesn’t have to grow into anything.

The same way he bonded with players in New England, the same way he assumed a leadership-type role even though he was a backup, Brissett has already been a team leader in Indianapolis. A trash-talking, fun-loving personality, loved by offense and defense alike, detail-oriented and demanding in practice, the kind of player who leads the charge to call a team meeting when the Colts stumble to a 1-5 start.

Kenny Moore played with Brissett in New England, considers the quarterback to be a big brother, found a place with the Colts at roughly the same time two years ago. From the moment he arrived in Indianapolis, Moore says, Brissett was the same guy he’d been with the Patriots, the same guy he’s been since Weis first started recruiting him to Florida.

The Colts, like the Patriots, love him for it. On the night that Luck retired, general manager Chris Ballard said Brissett was a “rare, rare leader,” the kind whose impact can be felt in all corners of the locker room

“You can fake the fans, you can fake the media,” Colts center Ryan Kelly said. “You can’t fake the locker room. People can see right through it.”

Weis believes it’s a mistake to count out the intangible, to minimize the respect and the love Brissett already has in Indianapolis. Weis was the offensive coordinator in New England in 2001, helped guide Brady as he took over for Drew Bledsoe.

That magnetic quality Brissett has always had, the ability to be the Pied Piper?

Brady’s like that. According to Weis, it’s a big part of why the Patriots kept their sixth-round pick on the roster in his rookie season in 2000, carried four quarterbacks on the roster even though New England prefers to keep only two. There was something special about the way Brady carried himself.

“What happens when you get a guy like that, is that those players — not that they didn’t play hard for Andrew — but they feel a little bit greater responsibility,” Weis said. “Their jobs now, in their minds, are more important. … That’s exactly what happened when Tommy started playing. They all pick up the pace.”

Brissett’s in the driver’s seat now, a place he’s been twice before, the only difference being that this time there’s no superstar looming in the distance, a comeback on the horizon.

The Patriots who played with him in New England are watching.

They don’t think the city of Indianapolis is going to be disappointed.