Tom Brady, the five-time Super Bowl champion quarterback of the New England Patriots, came to Massachusetts via San Mateo, Calif., and the University of Michigan.

He is married to the supermodel Gisele Bündchen and has owned a luxury apartment in Manhattan, where their family spent much time in the off-season. He endorses UGG, the Australian apparel company, and he published a book about his life as a diet and health nut whose favorite dessert is a dairy-free avocado ice cream, a flavor not readily available at J.P. Licks or any other popular Boston ice cream haven.

Despite all of this, which would figure to turn off the people in a region known, perhaps unfairly, for its insularity and, perhaps fairly, for its hatred of pretension, Brady is now the most favorite son of New England. How he managed to pull that off, to become bigger than Ted Williams and Larry Bird, and even Big Papi, David Ortiz, has more to do with timing, some key lifestyle decisions and a certain fight with the N.F.L. over deflated footballs than his mounting collection of Super Bowl rings.

“If you were drawing a sports cartoon and it showed a train and each car in the train represented one of the recent Boston championships,” said Richard Johnson, the curator of the Sports Museum in Boston, “Brady would be the engineer in the front stoking the fire.”