Eleven days shy of the first Sunday of his 45th year in football, Jim Irsay, dapperly dressed in the only manner in which Jim Irsay seems to dress — resplendent suit, silk tie, matching pocket square — lumbers his way out of the Indiana Roof Ballroom and toward a waiting elevator, hunched over as he so often is, satisfied smile stamped across his worn, 58-year-old face. It’s obvious. This man is pleased. He told the people what they wanted to hear.

Better yet: The people seemed to buy it.

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For a man whose net worth is north of $2 billion, Irsay takes no issue with occasionally playing marketing executive, in gripping the microphone and revving the masses. This particular afternoon is no different: Packed house, powerful friends in town, anticipation climbing as another season nears and the unknown teases. Tony Dungy said nice things about Irsay’s team. Roger Goodell said nice things about Irsay’s city. Irsay, sole owner of the Indianapolis Colts for 21 years and running, promised his most valued backers that the coming season “is going to have a different feel to it.”

So what if the star quarterback hasn’t practiced since five days after Christmas? So what if it’s anyone’s guess who the coach is a year from now? Irsay’s team hasn’t lost a game yet. He can sell that. He can sell hope.

No one will ever criticize Irsay for his brevity; when he talks, he taaaaaalks. A soliloquy about the state of his team often bleeds into a verbal odyssey. Irsay isn’t bashful (“I’m telling you, the offensive line is fixed!” he declared, a bit prematurely, this summer). He’ll go back to the old days (Peyton! Edge! Marv!) and sometimes, the really, really old days (Irsay is such an NFL lifer that George Halas was at his confirmation). But give him this: Few human beings on this planet have lived this league through the lens Jim Irsay has. This man has him some stories.

He started in the basement and climbed. He was the grunt who scooped up smelly jockstraps, the teenager who crooned classic rock with the players after games, the general manager who couldn’t build a winner, the owner who found the pieces who could.

“Move your ass, kid,” the great Johnny Unitas barked at 12-year-old Jimmy in the Baltimore Colts’ lunchroom back in the 1970s. By age 16, he was on the team bus, apologizing to the players after his fiery (and often drunk) father berated them after a preseason loss. “A tremendous thing for a teenager to do,” a Colts coach would say later.

By 26, he was the league’s youngest general manager, by 36 its youngest owner. After seizing full control of the franchise, he swallowed some pride, hired a chief architect named Bill Polian and watched his club become the ensuing decade’s winningest team. He celebrated the most meaningful triumph in franchise history — that magical 2006 AFC title game win over the rival Patriots — with cold pizza at the team facility at 2 a.m., reliving the years of heartache that made that moment so damn sweet, then flew every team employee and their spouse to the Super Bowl. He hoisted the Lombardi Trophy under a steady shower in South Beach. The grunt had made good.

Then, a few years later, he made the cold, calculated decision to blow it all up. His team’s steady ascent ever since has abruptly stalled the past two seasons — 8-8 isn’t all that bad if you own the Cleveland Browns or the Jacksonville Jaguars. But it is if you own the Indianapolis Colts, and you’ve twice punched lottery tickets at the top of the draft since 1998, and 10-plus-win seasons are the norm, the playoffs a birthright. So after another January at home, Irsay got fed up with mediocrity. He chased Gruden. He chased Manning. He struck out. (For now.) He fired his general manager, hired his replacement, kept his coach and vowed his star quarterback’s surgically repaired throwing shoulder would be ready for the opener.

He was wrong. And that’s a problem.

Miss the playoffs again and it’d be the Colts’ longest streak since the early 1990s, which was B.M. (Before Manning) and before this city became a football town. It’d also be an unthinkable disappointment as the second of those two lottery tickets, Andrew Luck, nears his prime. Herein lies Irsay’s predicament as the 2017 opener arrives Sunday in Los Angeles: He has a general manager building for the long haul, a coach who must win now, a quarterback who’s not ready to play and a roster that’s not ready to win.

But here’s the catch: Jim Irsay’s good with it. He knows his Colts must fall a little further before they rise back up.

“You guys know me,” he offered last spring, “I’d rather win two Lombardis and endure several losing seasons than have one Lombardi and be in the playoffs every single year. It’s about greatness. It’s about world championships.”

Two months later, inside an auditorium packed with season ticket holders, Irsay took the stage and doubled down. His face reddened as he spoke, his voice rising, his passion pouring into the microphone. This wasn’t a sales job. This was a man baring his soul.

“We’re into plural Lombardis,” he pledged. “And I’ll be damned if we don’t go out and get them.”

Jim Irsay can sell hope all he wants. The reality is this: For the first time since Andrew Luck came to town, this man is willing to lose.

***

After the Colts scraped past the 3-13 Jaguars on New Year’s Day in a game that avoided the team’s first losing season in five years but meant little else, Irsay disappeared. He was silent for 20 days. Rumors swirled. Jon Gruden? Speculation rose. Peyton Manning? Players were left in the dark, wondering who the coach would be, who the GM would be, what direction the franchise was headed.

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While Luck sought medical advice on his damaged throwing shoulder, Irsay weighed the murky state of his franchise, crisscrossing the country to seek counsel from the football minds he most trusts — Gruden, the former Bucs coach, and Manning, his former quarterback, included. Irsay later denied trying to woo Gruden from the ESPN booth to the Colts’ sidelines, though reports suggested the opposite. He downplayed his pursuit of Manning for a front-office position, but didn’t rule it out for the future.

In a lot of ways, those familiar with his thinking have revealed, Irsay knew all along the move he had to make. When the two close friends met a few weeks after the season ended, Polian could sense it immediately.

“A conversation that would take two hours with all but a handful of owners took about 15 minutes,” Polian remembers. “Jim has incredible vision. He understands every single aspect of the football operation in granular detail. He knows what he sees on the field perhaps more than any owner in football.

“He knew exactly what the issues were, particularly on defense. That’s why he made the changes he did.”

The change came after three weeks of silence. Irsay jettisoned his general manager of five years, Ryan Grigson, an executive he’d grown exceptionally fond of. “He’s a good man,” Irsay repeated not once, not twice, but four times as he announced Grigson’s firing. But the defense was a disaster, an aging, unsustainable unit, and Irsay knew it. The leaky offensive line Grigson assembled had nearly gotten Luck killed. The repeated whiffs in free agency and the draft were sending the Colts in reverse. In two years, they went from one game shy of Super Bowl XLIV to third place in the lowly AFC South.

And even then, Irsay spun it forward. He sold the next era before the next era even began.

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“There’s excitement in people’s eyes in the building today,” Irsay said that day.

Then, a week later, he opened another one. The day he hired Chris Ballard, Irsay labeled him “the best candidate to come about so far in the 21st century.” He’s repeatedly compared him to Polian — a Hall of Fame executive who built teams that went to six Super Bowls — in the months since. Selling. Always selling.

But listen closely and you’ll notice Irsay’s tenor has changed. The endgame hasn’t — he still craves those two Lombardis — but the expectations have, at least in the short term. Irsay is thinking about 2020 more than he’s thinking about 2017. He’s talking patience. He talking rebuild. For an owner who wants to win now, this instant, this weekend in L.A., the transition hasn’t been easy. As Polian points out, “You don’t build a defense overnight.” Deep down, Irsay knows the Colts are a few years away from really contending.

“You have to be willing to put up sometimes with having the patience to slow down and make sure we’re going to build this right,” he said this spring.

The Colts must build this right because they didn’t build it right the last time. They won so quickly, so unexpectedly in 2012 that the comprehensive rebuild Irsay had envisioned after he released Manning was scrapped. With Luck on his meager rookie deal, the Colts went for broke in free agency two straight years. Then it blew up in their face. What’d it get them? A few AFC South titles, a 38-point thrashing in the 2014 AFC title game in New England, Luck on the operating table and a defense that desperately needed to be torn apart.

So for the second time in five years, Irsay reset the franchise. This time, he vows, it’s going to be different. Half the opening day roster wasn’t here in 2016. A fifth of it is rookies. The defense will feature nine new starters.

Patience. Patience. Patience.

Irsay’s telling himself this, opining on the current and complex state of his football team, preaching prudence, when his $140 million quarterback pops into his head, this mesmerizing talent that fell into his lap five years ago but isn’t getting any younger.

“I tell ya, it’s hard being patient,” he says.

***

Let's be honest: He wants two Lombardis with Luck because Manning only gave him one. Appreciative as he is of Manning’s 14 gilded seasons in Indianapolis — the statue goes up in October — Irsay’s regret still burns. He’d swap all the records and all the glitzy stats and those 12-win seasons for one more trophy.

He can’t help but compare the two quarterbacks, the two eras, even though they’ve unfolded so drastically differently. Manning didn’t win a playoff game until after his sixth season; Luck won three his first three years. But Manning’s Colts, by that point, were a sleeping giant, an offense for the ages set to explode, a defense driven by game-changers named Freeney and Mathis and Sanders.

Where is Luck entering the sixth year of his career? In the training room, not the practice field, recovering from his second serious injury in as many seasons on a team that’s mediocre at every position.

Back then, Polian had built a team around No. 18. Ballard has stated its his mission to do the same around No. 12.

“Chris has got his work cut out for him,” Polian points out. “But he’s certainly capable.”

Which is why Irsay and his organization have been so delicate with Luck’s rehabilitation. This franchise is willing to swallow the lumps of 2017 if the payoff arrives down the line. At the team’s season kickoff luncheon this past week, in his dapper suit, silk tie and matching pocket square, even the title-hungry Irsay tempered his expectations.

“When I look at our football team, yes, there’s been a lot of transition,” he said. Translation: The team underwent an ambitious rebuild and 2017 likely won’t be a banner year. Instead he peddled what he could: A future that includes a healthy Andrew Luck.

“He will be back,” Irsay said without revealing any details, “and have a very, very long and great career with us.”

And that was enough for the crowd. Hearty applause followed. Irsay smiled.

He's selling hope, because sometimes that's all a man can sell.

Call IndyStar reporter Zak Keefer at (317) 444-6134. Follow him on Twitter: @zkeefer.