What about New England, where the team with the NFL’s best record played Saturday night and will play Sunday? Crickets. Can you hear the crickets?

Goodell has not set foot in New England, other than presumably to visit his vacation home in Maine, since that whole unfortunate Deflategate thing that he mismanaged into a gigantic and unnecessary mess that ended with Tom Brady’s acceptance of a four-game suspension at the start of the 2016 season.

Goodell has dared not venture into Gillette Stadium for two full seasons now. He missed the opener in September 2015, breaking with his tradition of appearing at the Super Bowl champion’s first game. While there is no question that he would be greeted, shall we say, negatively by Patriots fans — who heaped social media fury on him about his first playoff appearance in Seattle two weeks ago — it really is time to put all this behind him. For one thing, it appears that not all owners and fan bases are being treated equally. For another, he is only prolonging Deflategate.

Unless there is a credible threat to Goodell’s safety that the NFL is not sharing, he should just suck it up and appear in the cozy confines of a Gillette Stadium luxury suite. He’d be escorted in by guards and no one says he has to walk the field or pose for selfies with fans. All he has to do is just show up and sit there. He can even bring a taster to make sure the food is safe. For the tens of millions of dollars he is paid, it’s the least he can do.

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And if he’s waiting for an engraved invitation, well, it might have gotten lost in the mail.

“He’s the commissioner, so obviously whatever he wants to do, he can do,” Brady said on WEEI’s “Kirk and Callahan Show” on Monday. “If he wants to come, that would be — yeah, he can come. . . . He can go wherever he wants to go. Whoever is at the game is at the game.”

Okay, so cancel the gigantic “Welcome, Commish” mat.

“I’ll let you ask the league office about that,” Jonathan Kraft, the team’s president, said over the weekend when asked if Goodell would be welcome. “I don’t how they pick where he goes. They don’t call the teams. That’s not the way it works. I think the league office determines where he goes, and I don’t know the factors that go into that.”

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Owners, according to Kraft, do not extend invitations. “You know, if you’re opening a stadium or if there’s something special. But in the playoffs, I think the league determines through a variety of factors where the commissioner is going to go, and I might be totally wrong on that, too. I don’t know . . . I have no idea. You should probably ask Park Avenue and the guys there about how it gets determined.”

Brady and Kraft aren’t the only ones ambivalent on the matter.

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“I could not care less,” Patriots wide receiver Chris Hogan said. “I’m focused on Pittsburgh and their defense and studying them as much as I can this week, watching them as much as I can so that I can go out there on Sunday and be prepared.”

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Special teams captain Matthew Slater agreed.

“The game’s going to be played,” he said. “Whoever’s in attendance is in attendance. We’ll just worry about trying to play well.”

Tedy Bruschi, one of the Patriots’ great former players, urges Goodell to stay away. “There’s a lot of animosity towards Roger Goodell in New England,” he said Tuesday on ESPN. “I would recommend him not going either.”