BLOOMINGTON, Minn. — The true hero of Super Bowl LII will arrive Thursday with his little sister, Charlie, and his mother, Lexi. His name is Hudson Solder and his father, Nate, is the Patriots left tackle who will be protecting Tom Brady’s blind side from the Eagles.

Hudson Solder continues to battle kidney cancer.

He will be 3 years old in July and the tumors in his kidneys were discovered when he was 3 months old.

It was a full year before they removed the port that dropped chemotherapy drugs into his tiny body.

“[The tumor] wasn’t growing, wasn’t growing, wasn’t growing — boom, it started growing again, so they had to reinsert the port, start chemotherapy again, and that’s where we’re at now,” Solder said.

The dreaded news for Solder and his wife came in October at Boston Children’s Hospital.

“They brought us over to a private room,” he recalled. “I felt kind of numb to it, I didn’t know how to feel until a doctor kind of had a tear in her eye.

“And I was like, ‘Man, that means we’re starting this all over. That means that he’s at risk for so many different things again.’

“I tried to keep my cool, but I think when I started telling some of our coaches, I lost my cool a little bit, I broke down in front of them. They said if I ever need to take time that they would allow it, that they would not only allow it but support it.”

Hudson received chemo once a week for the first 10 weeks.

“We’re going to do a total of 25 weeks; he’s doing it every three weeks,” Solder said. “He’s going to have his next chemotherapy the Tuesday after the Super Bowl.”

Lexi Solder is a hero too.

“It’s been very brutal,” Solder said. “She’s there every day taking care of him, worrying about him, watching him, where I get to go work and play with my friends and play football and kind of have an escape from a lot of it, but she’s there in the thick of it every single day. She’s an amazing person. She handles it so well.”

Hudson was at Super Bowl LI last year. He will be in a hotel room for this one. After the Patriots survived against the Jaguars in the NFC Championship game, Hudson told his father: “Daddy, we’re going to the Super Bowl AGAIN!”

Solder chuckled as he talked about how excited Hudson is to take the plane here and the bus to the hotel.

“Hudson is a very fun kid. He’s always exploring, always very inquisitive. If you put him in a group of people, he’ll be off on his own checking things out around the perimeter,” Solder said with a chuckle. “He’s a very loving kid, him and his sister get along so well. They both light up when they see each other. He just gives her hugs and kisses.”

A father inspired by his son.

“You should see him do his treatments,” Solder said. “It’s pretty amazing. He gets a needle in his skin every week, and he doesn’t cry, he just sits there and takes it.

“He’s kind of funny, he goes, ‘Daddy, you can take the port now, I feel better,’ ” Solder said with a laugh.

The future is uncertain. These are pre-cancerous tumors.

“It’s all based on statistics and there’s not a lot of statistics because he is in a category of maybe like 20 kids,” Solder said. “But they think like when he’s 5 years old his risk goes down and when he’s 7 years old it goes down again, based on other kids. It’s difficult because there’s multiple tumors throughout each kidney, so you can’t remove one or take out a kidney because there would still be more left.”

Hudson blocks the chemo as fiercely as his father blocks defensive ends.

“He’s just so resilient,” Solder said. “He’ll come back from a day of chemotherapy, he’ll be pale and white as a ghost, he’ll be running around the house having fun. There are times where his blood counts will get low, he’ll be exhausted and just need his sleep. His immune system’s suppressed, so he gets sick all the time. But in terms of being a normal kid, he runs around and plays, tons of energy, a lot of fun.”

Solder’s in-laws will be watching Hudson and Charlie in the hotel room. Hudson doesn’t know he will not be at the game.

“I don’t know how that’s going to go over,” Solder said, and laughed.

His teammates and coaches are amazed by Solder’s strength.

Solder will be a free agent and had been linked to the Giants.

“It’s not my choice to talk about [Hudson’s cancer] publicly, that was my wife’s and I choice to help other people maybe, spread awareness, the news about it,” Solder said. “But to speak about it even on a daily basis it doesn’t bother me.”

Asked if it’s therapeutic for him, Solder said: “Yeah, sometimes it is, yeah.”

All the Solders are heroes.

“The Bible says we must decrease so that He can increase,” Solder said. “This whole year is a perfect testament of that because it’s not by my own strength that I’ve been able to play football, it’s not by my own strength that I’ve been able to take care of my family. It’s by His strength. He’s done it all.”

But little Hudson Solder is the biggest hero.

“He is a hero,” his father says, and smiles.