By Michael Hurley, CBS Boston

BOSTON (CBS) — And so it will be for embattled quarterback Tom Brady, after losing numerous times over the summer in the court of public opinion as well as in a federal court in New York City, to make his return to the football field Sunday night in Indianapolis.

But the question remains: Why bother?

Surely, Brady succeeded not only in designing the scheme to deflate those footballs but, consequently, to destroy his own reputation. Fifteen years of excellence — flushed down the drain for the rules violation that everyone knows was of grave significance.

Brady did the crime, and he did the time.

Though the quarterback — once considered among the greatest of all time, now known only for his disgusting misdeeds — should probably wallow in self-pity and leave the football-playing for the honorable men (like Aldon Smith, Sheldon Richardson, Greg Hardy, etc.), he will indeed be playing on Sunday night. It is a most foolhardy endeavor, and one can only assume the megalomaniac is taking the field solely to make a few more bucks.

But money can’t fix a damaged reputation, and after serving the four-game suspension, there’s just no way he’ll ever get back his good name.

Fittingly, the return to the gridiron will take place at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, the scene of the crime. It was in that same stadium last November when the Colts intercepted two Tom Brady passes and instantly knew something was amiss. Forget the fact that Brady had, you know, thrown interceptions with the footballs; clearly, the quarterback was cheating to gain a distinct edge.

So the equipment staff — the same equipment staff that never acts suspiciously during games, and the same equipment staff that would stick a pressure gauge into a football on the sideline in Foxboro just two months later — acted accordingly, like any vigilant steward of the integrity of The Shield™ would do, and … inspected the footballs and kept their suspicions quiet for a couple of months. After all, considering Colts employees would have been handling the footballs after the officials’ inspection that day, there would be no real reason for the Colts organization to be suspicious of the Patriots’ footballs.

But in January, taking a warning from their pals in the Baltimore Ravens organization, the Colts lobbed a complaint, rightfully, with the NFL, to be on high alert for funny business from the Patriots.

Brady was going down.

Not on the field, of course. On the field, Brady led his team to its most decisive victory of the season, a 45-7 romp in which LeGarrette Blount casually sauntered through the Colts’ defense and into the end zone numerous times. Two weeks later, Brady would throw four touchdowns in the Super Bowl, going 13-for-15 for 174 yards and two touchdowns in the final quarter. (Conveniently, MVP voters overlooked Brady’s two dreadful interceptions in naming the quarterback the most outstanding player of the game. Sycophants, the whole lot of ’em.) On the field, with properly inflated footballs in the Super Bowl, Brady was a champion.

But off the field, the jig was up, and Brady had been caught red-handed holding the illegal footballs in that AFC Championship Game.

From there, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell was left with no choice but to come down hard on the quarterback. After all, NFL employees had done an impeccable job of properly recording every necessary measurement, starting in pregame (except when referee Walt Anderson didn’t record the PSI readings of the footballs and then lost them), moving along to halftime (when they measured 11 Patriots balls with different gauges, got wildly different readings, and then measured only four Colts footballs, getting readings below the allowable limit on three of them but thinking nothing of it and also failing to mark down the sequence and time of the measurements), and after the game (when they measured just four of the Patriots’ footballs as a random representative of the balls used in the game). Truly, it was a remarkable showing of efficiency, one for which the NFL has never received proper attention.

Sure, the consulting firm which the NFL paid beaucoup bucks to “investigate” the offense determined that the provided information was insufficient. But honestly, all anyone had to do was look at the facts to know that Brady was guilty. (Assuredly, there were facts, but Ted Wells didn’t have enough space in his 243-page report to list them. Don’t get bogged down with details, people.)

So, Goodell issued a four-game suspension, and frankly, he might have gone easy on Brady. A Pete Rose-level lifetime ban might have been in the cards if a more vengeful, vindictive man had been in charge of the league. Fortunately for Brady, Goodell is fair, reasonable and just, so the punishment was only for a quarter of the season.

In any case, Brady selfishly challenged Goodell’s ruling, and Goodell was eventually proven right by U.S. District Judge Clifford Sherman. That’s the same federal judge who upheld Goodell’s decision, the judge who remarked upon the great character and integrity of Goodell, and the judge who observed and admonished Brady for his missteps and lies throughout the process.

It was an embarrassing scene all around for Brady, who took a bad situation and made it worse by presenting the flimsiest of arguments in court. With all that money, you’d think Brady would have been able to afford some better lawyers.

Now, the face-saving effort begins for Brady, and he’ll have to do it in front of the fans of the Colts. Those folks will no doubt be laughing at the failed comeback attempt of the 38-year-old outcast whilst simultaneously enjoying the splendor of watching their own 26-year-old phenom in the midst of another fantastic season.

Obviously, there is zero chance of Brady performing at even close to the level at which he played when he was given carte blanche to manipulate the footballs however he saw fit. The Brady zealots would likely say that had Brady been playing in the Patriots’ first four games of the season, that he would have completed a career-best 72.5 percent of his passes for a career-best 346.8 yards per game, and that he would have thrown 11 touchdowns and zero interceptions.

Please.

These Brady honks are delusional, and I invite them to exchange their Patriots pajamas for a one-way ticket back to Planet Earth. If Brady played in those games to start the season, he would have stunk. End of story. Facts are facts. If you deny that one, you’ve probably been denying the man’s clear and plain guilt all along.

Nevertheless, the quarterback will make his ill-advised return to the field on Sunday night. It will undoubtedly be the most shameful moment of his career. For such a fashionable man, disgrace is a style that even he cannot pull off.

All along, Brady had a chance to do what was right, to accept that he was wrong, to drop his fight and avoid dragging out the process while draining valuable time and resources in the court system, and to avoid the embarrassment that comes with losing a showdown when the whole world was watching.

Surely, history will show that the disgraced quarterback will come to rue the day he decided to fight Roger Goodell and the NFL.

Read more from Michael Hurley by clicking here. You can email him or find him on Twitter @michaelFhurley.