THE COPING CYCLE begins again. He manufactures hope by thinking about teams that rallied from poor Septembers to reach the Super Bowl. By Monday night against the Jets, he has tenuously rebounded. He shakes off double-teams to catch 10 passes for 97 yards. But Atlanta falls to 1-4 on a last-second field goal.

That sends Gonzalez into a funk again. The next day, he drives around town with his friend Nick, alternating between silence and venting about the season. They stop for gas, and as Gonzalez stands at the pump, he suddenly feels as if he has to get away. One of the sad truths about being a professional athlete is that in the end, you always feel alone. He turns to Nick, seated in the front of the SUV, and asks him to drive the two miles home. He wants to walk.

Gonzalez puts on his headphones, dialing up alternative rock, trying to understand more than why the season is slipping away. He's trying to understand why he came back. "It's completely the opposite of what I thought it would be," he says. "Nobody could have foreseen this. If I knew this was going to happen, I wouldn't be here."

Anger turns into remorse. He thinks about his oldest son, 12-year-old Nikko, who lives in California with his mother. This is Nikko's first year in youth football. He is a tight end too. Gonzalez remembers back to August, when instead of sweating with teammates, he would watch Nikko's practices as the sun set. Something about it felt so pure, the symmetry of one career beginning as another was ending. He would listen to the coaches yell "Do it again, Gonzalez!" during tackling drills, and it took him back to his childhood, when he was the target of those bullies. He was once so terrified, he left his middle school graduation ceremony. His family found him hiding behind a wall. He felt so ashamed, he decided to confront his tormentors, ready to brawl. When they backed off before fists could be thrown, Gonzalez began to learn the virtues of being aggressive, the same lesson his son was learning on a team that would end up winning its youth Super Bowl, rubbing it in during this disaster of a ...

An SUV pulls up. It's Tobie, who happened to be driving by when she spotted a familiar hulking frame. "Hey, guy, you want a ride?"

"I'm good," Gonzalez says.

That night, he prays for strength. He ends up returning to the only answer that has ever given him peace: his routine. By the next game, he is ready. In the fourth quarter of a win against the Bucs, he catches a dump-off pass and explodes upfield. A tackler flies up from the secondary, but Gonzalez cuts inside and makes him miss. A linebacker closes from the inside, but Gonzalez slaloms outside. He feels young, lithe. A cornerback tries to wrap him up, but Gonzalez lowers his shoulders and plows him over. It takes three Bucs to finally drive him out of bounds. Gonzalez glances up at the replay, for what he's convinced was a gain of 40, maybe 50 yards.

It was 10.

THE TRADE DEADLINE is Oct. 29, a final lifeline. The Falcons, now 2-5, are going nowhere, which has Gonzalez considering a way out. It's tearing him up inside. Demanding a trade to a contender could ruin his legacy. So when he meets with Smith and GM Thomas Dimitroff, he's careful not to ask for a trade. But he makes it clear he will accept one. "You trade me to a team that needs me, that wants to make a serious run in the playoffs and the Super Bowl," Gonzalez says later. "You get something in return for a guy who you know won't be here next year. And the season isn't going anywhere anyway. That's rational."

Now that Gonzalez has opened his mind to a trade, his hopes are up. On Oct. 29, he and Tobie sit at a Buckhead restaurant in silence as the 4 p.m. deadline approaches. The Seahawks and Chiefs are rumored to be interested. Gonzalez texts friends around the NFL, asking if they've heard anything, unaware that back at the facility Dimitroff has no intention of dealing him. The Falcons have so many injuries that without Gonzalez, Ryan would have no one to throw to. It also would, as Dimitroff later says, "send a horrendous message" that management is waving the white flag. Finally, if Gonzalez decides to return in 2014, the Falcons want to own his rights.

Minutes pass, and Gonzalez's phone is quiet. At 4:01, an agonizing truth.

"Welp," Gonzalez says to Tobie, stifling his anger, "we're staying here."

"Well, shit," she says.

THAT WEEK, ON the 45-minute drive to work, Gonzalez pities himself. Tension inside him has been building, and he can no longer even try to make sense of it. His goals now seem like a cruel joke. He had always said he could retire in peace without a Super Bowl, knowing deep down it was a lie. Now he's trying hard to believe it. "If I can't win a Super Bowl, so what?" he says. "What would it do for me?"

ESPN The Magazine Podcast Ryan Hockensmith talks with Seth Wickersham about Tony Gonzalez's journey through a terrible season with Falcons, his critical comments about Matt Ryan, if he was hoping to be traded, when he will retire and much more.

In September he had invited players to join him in his routine. A few did initially, but now nobody participates. He watches other receivers casually play catch and chitchat before practice -- then drop key passes on Sunday. Gonzalez fears and fantasizes about what he might say if he were to address the team. But he always returns to his routine, like a train on tracks. The failure of unmet goals simply adds to the cosmic failure of his decision to come back.

He bitches to his teammates about losing. He pouts about the constant double-teams. He muses about telling everyone to kiss his ass goodbye. "You know when you're a kid and you say, 'I'm going to run away'? That's how I acted. Like a pissed-off kid. I'm going to show them. I'm just going to leave. They're never going to see me again. I'm not going to care about them."

Smith seems to sense it. After Friday's practice, he unloads on the team and indirectly at Gonzalez. "You got a game this week. We still have a chance to turn it around. It's been done before. Who are we to feel sorry for ourselves?"

It is, Gonzalez would later say, exactly what he needed to hear. "I only have nine games left," he says. "I'm not going to go out there and put shit on film."

In the second quarter that Sunday against Carolina, he runs a crossing route, and Ryan fires behind him. Running full speed, Gonzalez twists back and pulls the ball from a defender for 14 yards. A few days later, Chris Scelfo, Gonzalez's tight ends coach, will call it "a Hall of Fame catch, the best of your career."

The Falcons lose again.

HE IS ASLEEP on the couch. It's mid-December, and the Falcons have dropped five of six games. Tobie is preparing dinner, and the kids are stealing crayons from each other. Gonzalez wakes up and comes to and begins to ponder questions he can no longer put off. What will he do without football? Who will comprise his "metaphorical locker room"? What will be his passion?

He has no easy answers. Gonzalez plans to work in TV next fall, but he knows that discussing football isn't as fulfilling as playing it. By now it's clear he returned to stave off a series of looming fears: of boredom, of self-identity, of never again feeling the highs that have sustained him. Dennis has tried to discuss this with him a few times, but Tony won't engage. He has spent years striving to not be one-dimensional, learning Spanish and traveling the world and working closely with his charity foundation, lest he become one of the legions of legends who can't find happiness away from the game. He knows that "a part of me is dying," and he has pre-emptively taken steps to avoid detestable drama -- He's retired! He's unretired! Make up your mind! -- by scheduling to see a therapist as soon as the season is over. But here he is, falling into a familiar trap. The only thing forcing him away is not pain, not inability, but nerves. "The hardest thing next year will be watching games knowing that I could play at a Pro Bowl level," he says.

Now nostalgia is seeping in. He'll miss the locker room. He'll miss the drive to work on I-985. He'll miss the refs telling him not to push off. All of this is slowly taking him down a path he hates but can't resist. On a double date with Matt and Sarah Ryan, Gonzalez says, "Maybe, if the team is hot in November, 9-2 or something, I could come back for the last two months."

"You're coming back!" Ryan says.

But a few days later, the Falcons blow an 11-point lead and lose at Green Bay. On one particular route, Packers safety Jarrett Bush, No. 24 (*See footnote), gets in his face. "Fuck you!" Bush says. "You ain't shit!"

Gonzalez looks around, waiting for someone to set Bush straight. Nobody does. Years ago this would have fired him up. Now he's just exasperated. He walks away, but Bush doubles down, bumping face masks. Stunned, Gonzalez says the first thing that pops into his head: "Calm down, young buck!" Bush laughs.

It's 13 degrees and snowing. Gonzalez thinks: I don't need this anymore.

OF COURSE, HE knows that isn't true. Maybe that's why, in the week leading up to his final game, Gonzalez seems antsy, irritable. He wants his send-off to be perfect, but Tobie and the kids have the flu, and 40 guests are coming to town, and every media outlet wants an exclusive, and he is thinking ahead to the Pro Bowl. For a while, he swore he wouldn't go, not wanting a joke of a game to be his last. Now he wants to play.

It's a sad week around the Falcons' building, losing a legend on top of a lost year. Dimitroff had no idea that when he traded for Gonzalez he was getting a machine that would overwhelm the franchise, in ways both small -- the cafeteria didn't have a juice bar before he arrived -- and large. Ryan remembers, before their first practice, seeing Gonzalez locked into his routine. Something clicked and soon Ryan started to drop back and roll out, emulating a game. Then receivers followed suit. Then defensive linemen. Smith always told the rookies, "If you're going to follow somebody, follow Tony." The image of a team practicing before practice "is firmly ingrained in all of our minds," Dimitroff says, and the result was four straight winning seasons, culminating in falling yards short of last year's Super Bowl.

This season, though, something was different. All the lessons were either lost or forgotten. The fear of not leaving a legacy of determination begins to demoralize Gonzalez as much as his legacy of not reaching the Super Bowl. All that's left is the modest triumph of just one accomplished goal. Gonzalez suspects that Smith will ask him to speak to the team Saturday night -- for the first time. What should he say? Does he thank the team for the memories or say what he really thinks?

Surrender your fear.

Sure enough, Smith asks him to talk. Gonzalez stands before the team at ease, without notes, as if he's waited all his life for this moment. "I've been through this before," he says. He tells them about how the fear of failure led to his "obsessive-compulsive" routine and how he learned the hard way how thin the line is between wins and losses. "It made me the player that I am," he says. "I wouldn't be standing here if that didn't happen."

He looks his teammates in the eyes. "A lot of you don't know how to work," he says. "Whether you think you know it or not, it wasn't good enough. Look at the season." It's the most devastating statement he's ever delivered. There's no telling how it is going over, but he doesn't care. "Don't waste this losing," he says. "Don't waste this season. You grow the most when you face this type of stuff."

His speech lasts about 10 minutes. At the end, Gonzalez begins to choke up. He doesn't notice, but several teammates are beginning to cry too, including Ryan, from wounded pride, from guilt, from the sight of a future Hall of Famer showing his heart. Gonzalez ends by saying, "Thank you for the opportunity to play with you."

They give him a standing ovation.