One year ago this week, an Indianapolis Colt named D'Qwell Jackson intercepted a Tom Brady pass in the AFC championship game.

The ball soon found its way into the hands of Brian Seabrooks, the Colts' assistant equipment manager, who was suspicious of its inflation level. He quickly had an intern measure it from the sideline (and in the approximately 48-degree temperature of Foxborough, Mass.). When it came in under the NFL minimum 12.5 pounds per square inch, everyone from Colts executives to officials and even an NFL vice president believed it was proof of blatant cheating.

The entire case worked backward from there, even if science says the psi level was probably exactly where it should naturally be and thus nothing unnatural, let alone nefarious, was occurring.

Science, of course, meant nothing in this case. At least not at the time.

View photos The football's size doesn't seem to matter to Tom Brady. (AP) More

What mattered was either the willful rejection or complete ignorance of it. No one in power that night in New England apparently knew what Ideal Gas Law was, let alone how it worked.

So deflate-gate was born.

One year later, Brady and the Patriots return to the AFC championship game on Sunday in Denver. Since that fateful moment an intern tested the football, Brady has gone 15-4 on the field and 1-0 in federal court. He has captured a Super Bowl and thrown 44 touchdowns against nine interceptions (with the NFL watching the footballs).

And despite the NFL stripping New England of a first-round pick, fining it $1 million and millions of fans still believing the story, you actually have to wonder if deflate-gate is finally dead … at least to anyone still paying attention. Namely, there appears to be a scientific consensus, if not unanimous opinion, that those footballs were never illegally deflated.

Most of the attention on the scandal has involved the circumstantial evidence, the leaking of false and prejudicial information, the invention of testimony, the federal court drama, the humor, the alibis, the excuses, the "deflator," New York tabloid headlines, the everything.

It's been wild, an all-time great media soap opera. It was easy to believe something happened. Yet early on scientists began arguing that the entire thing was really a misunderstanding of Ideal Gas Law. Bill Belichick even tried to explain it.

The problem at the time is the arguments were being made with false data supplied by the NFL (which vastly overstated the numbers) and no information on how it was collected or any surrounding circumstances. That allowed someone such as "Bill Nye the Science Guy" to counter Belichick's rudimentary defense in an analysis so shallow and unscientific it was comical (it was literally on "Funny or Die").

It was widely distributed, though, and most heard that and gave up on the science, tuning out howls from the Patriots.

The NFL brought in the group Exponent to handle its scientific analysis of the game balls. Exponent, of course, has been accused for decades for being hired by corporations to study and provide favorable finding on things such as the dangers of second-hand cigarette smoke, asbestos, possible automobile design flaws and even whether the Exxon Valdez needed a second hull. Exponent denies this and says its science is sound.

In this case, even Exponent acknowledged that it couldn't "determine with absolute certainty whether there was or was not tampering." That didn't matter to the NFL. Exponent couldn't rule out foul play, either.

Story continues