Appropriately for the assault on intelligence that would become known as deflate-gate, the first test of the footballs came with an abundance of suspicion and a lack of knowledge. The NFL never has been much for book learnin’, after all.

An intern in the Indianapolis Colts’ equipment department was handed a just intercepted New England Patriots football in the 2014 AFC championship game and told to check the air pressure. Right there on the sideline the “test” was done and, as the Colts suspected, it came in below the NFL minimum 12.5 pounds per square inch.

Up the chain of command went the discovery, all the way to NFL executives in a box high above Gillette Stadium. The Pats were busted, dead busted. Finally, they had that cheating Bill Belichick by the, ah, footballs.

View photos Tom Brady says he won’t fight the NFL over deflate-gate anymore. (AP) More

“We weighed the balls,” the NFL’s Mike Kensil soon told the Patriots, according to a Sports Illustrated. “You are in big [expletive] trouble.”

The fact that the initial test – which has nothing to do with weight – was done outdoors in 48 degrees temperature, nearly two hours after the balls were loosely measured to be about 12.5 psi in the warmth of a locker room, apparently escaped everyone involved. Scientifically, what would have been notable is if the footballs weren’t below 12.5, notably measuring in the 11s. Anything else would have disproved an agreed upon fact – a law – first stated by a Frenchman named Emile Clapeyron way back in 1834 and supported by every scientist to walk the Earth since.

There were no scientists in Foxborough that night. There were guys like Kensil, a former New York Jets executive since reassigned by the NFL from game-day duties. Most notably, there was NFL executive vice president Troy Vincent, who immediately spearheaded the investigation into what the league believed was a massive cheating operation when it was just PV = nRT occurring. Vincent later acknowledged that at the time he’d never heard of Ideal Gas Law.

If Vincent, Kensil – or anyone else – had studied physics, deflate-gate likely would have (or should have) ended before it even began. They either would have laughed at the Colts’ outdoor test or understood time was needed for footballs to re-acclimate to indoor conditions at halftime.

Instead it took 544 days, from that AFC title game following the 2014 season to Friday, when Patriots quarterback Tom Brady announced he wouldn’t pursue a virtually hopeless attempt to get the Supreme Court of the United States to take a case that is now about arbitration law, rule of shop and industrial justice, not what actually happened that night.

This closes one of the most bizarre scandals in the history of the NFL, a story so mind-numbingly dumb because it required a rejection of facts, math and science in exchange for media leaks, manipulated testimony, hard-headedness and whatever else inspires commissioner Roger Goodell’s office.

It produced plenty comedy of course.

You couldn’t invent the nickname “The Deflator” or the fact he couldn’t get it right whether he went to the bathroom in a urinal or stall. He was a bumbling fall guy for the league straight from central casting. Then there was the time head coach Bill Belichick cited “My Cousin Vinny” in a defensive news conference – “I would not say that I am Mona Lisa Vito of the football world,” he noted, although many worshiping Patriots fans beg to differ.

There were dozens of outrageous headlines, a scandal out of the New York tabloids’ wildest dreams (Brady: “My Balls Are Perfect.”) There were four hearings over this nonsense in an actual federal court. Imagine that. One included a courtroom sketch artist who somehow managed to make Brady look emaciated and ugly, who subsequently gave sheepish interviews to the tabloids explaining herself. There was the time a seventh-grader won his school science fair proving the NFL was wrong and the footballs were never unnaturally deflated. His name: Ben Goodell.

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