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“So, I don’t know. Apparently, if you want to be a franchise quarterback then there’s no hope to have boys anytime soon.”

It wasn’t always that way.

“I know Henry (Burris) had like two or three, but he retired and took them all with him,” Reilly said. “It’s crazy. I was like, ‘I’m going to break the trend.” And, nope. No, I wasn’t.”

Photo by Larry Wong / POSTMEDIA NETWORK

Not that he’s in the slightest way disappointed.

“When I found out I was having a daughter with Brooklyn, I felt very weird about it,” Reilly recalled. “I have two brothers, I do have a younger sister but I had always pictured having a son and I was like, ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do with a girl, really.’

“But now that Brooklyn’s here, I can’t imagine any other way. She’s the best. She’s awesome.”

And that makes Reilly a prototypical doting dad.

“She’s talking and running around all over the place now,” he said. “I’m like, ‘You are a handful,’ and I can’t even really get mad at here because it’s my little girl.”

Reilly’s got his own theory.

“They say if you have so much testosterone as the dad, there’s not enough in the house for another boy,” he said. “It’s all got to be girls, apparently. That must be it, right?”

The only thing he knows is he’d better enjoy it now, because the teenage years and beyond will be something else entirely.

“Boys are going to be showing up, weddings to pay for,” Reilly said. “I don’t want to think about that.”

Until the time comes for papa Reilly to start keeping some form of dating deterrent near his front door, the only shotgun he’s focused on for now is the on-field formation he takes snaps out of.

Heck, he might even have a sharpened focus thanks to the increase in girl power on the home front, according to one of his aforementioned colleagues.

“When I talked to him at CFL Week, I know they had an ultrasound coming up to figure out the gender, but we both knew that he didn’t even need to look at it,” said Nichols. “So it was pretty funny when I saw that it was a girl.

“But it’s a blessing, for sure, and we were really close during our time in Edmonton so, obviously, he got to know me when I had my daughter first and I feel like it’s changed him the same way it changed me.

“It just gives you some more perspective and allows you to take a step back and realize how lucky we are to be playing this game and not take it as such a job. And I feel like it’s actually shown in both of our plays these last couple years, so I’m happy for them.”

The Nichols family had one of the more memorable – and expensive – baby announcements last May, taking to social media with a picture of four pairs of Nike Air Jordan 4s, all the way from dad size down to new baby.