GLENDALE, Arizona — It was a hot game day that became one of those muggy summer nights when my mobile flip-phone began to buzz.

“We’ve got an issue up here in the north stands,” the voice said. “You better get over here.”

It was August 2004, my first season as the media relations director of the CFL’s since-folded Ottawa Renegades. On the other end of the phone was our president, Brad Watters.

Stadium security had apprehended a man with a video camera in the stands who had been filming the home bench. He was wearing a brand new Renegades shirt. It looked like it had been purchased maybe an hour or two earlier.

I’d been around the Alouettes as a radio reporter in Montreal in 2002 and 2003, and instantly recognized the fella trying to plead his case to get his camera back. It was Als assistant equipment man Serge Brotherton. He wouldn’t spill the details, but Serge had been sent by his bosses on a two-hour road trip to the nation’s capital to film the Ottawa coaches and get their signals on tape during the game.

The Renegades were playing the Alouettes two weeks later.

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Mr. Brotherton was sent on his way, but Watters kept the goods. And lo and behold, once we popped on the tape there was video zoomed in on defensive coordinator Gary Etcheverry signalling in a play. Then the camera moved toward the scoreboard to get the time on the clock, down and distance, and panned back to the bench to record some more. The sequence continued on the offensive side of the ball, too.

Back at Alouettes headquarters, had the tape made it to Olympic Stadium, it would have been synched up with the game film for preparation purposes. Standard operating procedure, I’d come to find out.

My bosses were livid, but the football folks had their blood pressure intact. Our head coach at the time, Joe Paopao, one of the finest human beings I’ve ever worked with, just smirked and shook his‎ head after the game when he was told.

“That’s Don,” he shrugged, and then we walked up the stairs to his post-game press conference.

“Don” was Alouettes head coach Don Matthews, who in the media a couple of days later told reporters that “everyone does it, even my friends in the NFL.”

***

I thought about Don in the fall of 2007, when Spygate became, you know, a thing.

Initially when news first broke, I chuckled to myself, thinking of Serge in his Renegades shirt, pleading with security and insisting to team officials that he was “just a fan.” And by then, was fully aware that finding a way to bend the rules in pro football was as common as watching game film.

But Spygate erupted, and then came the avalanche of moral outrage that these Patriots were some rogue outfit — that they were cheaters. Th‎e studio shows and talk radio hosts howled: how dare they? It was actually proclaimed the very integrity‎ of the game was at stake. They even wondered aloud, was that why New England had won three Super Bowls?

It was preposterous, of course, and for a moment you would have thought it was a joke, until Roger Goodell slapped Bill Belichick with a $500,000 fine, demanded $250,000 from Robert Kraft and stripped the team of a 2008 first-round draft choice.

Then what did the commissioner do? He destroyed the tapes, shredded the documents, burned the evidence in a sacrificial ceremony at Vince Lombardi’s grave (okay, maybe not the last part) and made it clear‎ that it was only the Patriots that had broken the rules, and this was‎ the punishment moving forward.

On his high horse, Goodell proclaimed that every NFL team was on alert.

Comedy.

***

I was again reminded of Don and Serge and Spygate, like many of you last week, when “Deflate-gate” turned into an even more heated thing — one of those nationally-hyped scandals that would make Monica Lewinsky blush.

Here were those Patriots, again! Those damn cheaters, again! First,‎ the hand signals, now deflated balls! How dare they!?

We were almost led to believe there for a minute that Andrew Luck had to throw a shot put and Tom Brady was tossing around a rubber ducky.

Fourteen straight winning seasons, a dozen playoff appearances, nine (nine!) AFC title games played, and a sixth Super Bowl visit since 2002, and all you could find on any channel, website or social media stream was Deflate-gate. Around-the-clock coverage, breathlessly, instantly, reaching the conclusion — depending on who you asked — that those achievements happened because the Patriots are cheaters.

Not just that, but they’re messing with the, ahem, integrity of the game.

Got it.

Anyone ask Pete Carroll about cheating and the integrity of the game?‎ Maybe we can ask him where Reggie Bush’s Heisman trophy is this week.

Anyone ask Brandon Browner about cheating and the integrity of the game? He tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs. The Seahawks still signed him. Then he tested positive again, and the Patriots signed him. And nobody cared.

But one or two pounds-per-square-inch of air pressure? By the end of Thursday’s Tom Brady press conference — a mob-scene, cross-examination circus from some who, before this episode, were most likely unaware that footballs are pumped with air and not stuffed with feathers — it felt like someone needed to phone the Warren Commission.

Then came Saturday, in that now infamous, forthcoming, defiant and angry rant by the five-time world champion coach. For a brief moment, air pressure gave way to Spygate again. After all, there’s a pattern‎ of cheating now, right? And amidst those 22 unfiltered minutes from Belichick, this, in response to 2007 and the Patriots finding themselves down this road again: “The guy’s giving signals in front of‎ 80,000 people, okay? So we filmed their signals in front of 80,000 people, like there were a lot of other teams doing that at the time, too,” Belichick snapped back.

***

What are other teams doing? Well, I can tell you just a few anecdotes that have gone on north of the border.

That same 2004 season, before a you-better-win-in-Calgary-Friday-night-or-you’ll-lose-your-job game, I walked into the office of one of our Renegades coaches to see some assistants sitting with a linebacker named Charles Assmann, who had just been cut by the Stampeders and immediately signed by Ottawa.

They were picking his brain to gather any and all information on what the Stamps did on defence and special teams, looking for any insider knowledge, any edge they could find.

The next year, in 2005, I popped by the fax machine (remember when we used those?) about midway through the schedule and saw four pages of handwritten notes sent from a 905 area code to the team office to the attention of one of the coaches. The notes detailed what personnel the Tiger-Cats were using in practice, in which formations they would use motion, how their gadget plays worked, what kind of fake punts they worked on, who was sitting out with injury, and on and on.

Later that 2005 season, a year after Serge had his camera confiscated, about an hour before kickoff on a game day, I was leaving the field to drop off some player tickets at will call when I ran into three Alouettes coaches. They’d smartened up. No video this time.

Instead, armed with their laptop bags and binoculars and notebooks, they had a system where one would describe the signal, one would take dictation and the other would log the time on the clock and the down and distance. See, all the filming does is decrease manpower. The joys of technology.

Anyhow, I saw them walk toward the box office to actually buy three tickets‎ when I stopped and introduced myself. One of them looked so damn crestfallen you would have thought someone had stolen his car.

“Not to worry, boys,” I said.

I didn’t even bother making the coaches pay. We all know how little CFL‎ coaches make. They went through the media entrance and we all had a chuckle when I asked their sizes, so they could each pretend to be a Renegades fan, wearing a shirt like their old pal Serge.

By 2008, I was working in Winnipeg. Doug Berry, a former Alouettes assistant under Matthews, was the head coach. Kirk Penton, the terrific football reporter from the Winnipeg Sun, asked him if Doug and his staff were concerned about their signals being stolen.

“That’s something I worried about years ago,” Berry said, smiling. “Not anymore.”

Integrity of the game? On the Argonauts sideline not that long ago there were actual signs for players with a breakdown of opponents’ hand signals. In Edmonton, they’d grow the grass long and water the hell out of the lawn the night before the game, knowing their Eskimos would have the long spikes and footwear to deal with the natural turf — not just the seven-stud cleats that opponents would bring to Commonwealth.

In 2009 a dude named Ronnie Trentini, then a scout for Winnipeg, was busted at a Tiger-Cats practice for taking detailed notes of what Hamilton was doing with its formations and personnel — not dissimilar to the report I’d found on the fax machine four years earlier. The league slapped Winnipeg on the wrist, then-Bombers coach Mike Kelly ranted at the media that it was “handled internally, a non-issue, I’m not talking about it,” and Trentini was made the fall guy as an “overzealous employee trying to make a good impression.”

He wasn’t out of a gig long. The next season, then-Winnipeg assistant GM John Murphy went to Calgary. In 2010, Trentini’s name was on the Rogers Centre press box seating chart as a scout for the Stampeders.

So long as they pump air into footballs, and 10 yards are required for a first down, and job security hinges on winning and losing, this will continue. And if it’s happening this openly, and knowingly in Canada, where the stakes are nowhere close to the multi-billion dollar empire of the NFL, then a pound or two per square-inch of air pressure is minimal relative to the threshold of actual cheating.

They’ll be out with pitchforks this week. Wanting blood. From Belichick. From Brady. Already here in Arizona, unbelievably, there’s the insistence there be an asterisk of sorts next to the remarkable accomplishments and sustained success in the salary cap and free agency era. That New England’s living dynasty is a result of a brazen, live-on-the-edge, win-at-all-costs mentality that exists nowhere outside of Foxboro.

But just between you and I, despite the uproar and the rage and the hilarious moral compass everyone seems to be guided by these last few days, the Patriot Way of excellence is not a result of knowing some signals‎ or lesser air pressure in footballs. It’s having the most dominant quarterback of the past two generations; their tight end becoming all but unstoppable; retaining the most consistent NFL defensive tackle for more than a decade. It has to do with relocating Revis Island to suburban Boston and being innovative enough to make the left tackle as valuable a weapon as the receiver who threw a touchdown pass in a playoff game by using a play design you’d only expect to see on X-Box.

These are the Patriots, hoping to hoist the Lombardi trophy for a fourth time. Their sixth Super Sunday of the millennium. The closest team to match it in that span: the Giants and Seahawks, who have each made three appearances with a combined four different quarterbacks and four different head coaches.

What we are witnessing is sustained greatness — a modern day dynasty. Pittsburgh. Dallas. New England, the best in football history.

Serge Brotherton stuck around the Alouettes for years after he was busted in Ottawa. He has a few championship rings, and has probably seen more espionage than air pumps and hand signals.

To this day, I still wonder if he wears the Renegades t-shirt.