The NFL regular season opened Thursday night with the promise of rescuing us from the offseason of DeflateGate. Instead, we couldn’t get through an entire half without the launch of a new Gate: HeadsetGate. That was quickly followed by Illegal ShiftGate. (I’m not sure if it’s being called that yet, but I want to get ahead of the CurveGate.)

It all served as a reminder that we will never escape the storyline of the Patriots-as-cheaters. Their rule-bending legacy is etched in stone — outside of New England, at least — and the week-to-week news cycle is just going to engrave it deeper. With that in mind, we all need to prepare for the 2015 Patriots scandals to come.