FOXBOROUGH, Mass. — The sky was the color of the bottom of a gutter. The slanting, sideways rain plastered Tom Brady’s hair to the other side of his head as he stood on the opposite sideline. It was all inverted, from an odd angle. It wasn’t his home field, and the wind and the New England Patriots made him feel it. He ran onto the field Sunday night and did his habitual sprint the length of it and threw a fist in the air, but he came out of the wrong entrance, from an unaccustomed direction in Gillette Stadium. “I couldn’t run through the normal tunneI,” he said afterward. “It just happened to be the opposite tunnel tonight. Just a lot of emotions.”You could feel that strange, countervailing undertow all night long in this strange game, in which Brady never seemed to quite get comfortable. Partly that was because of the checkmating defense by his old coach Bill Belichick, and partly it was the pelting rain and chill winds, which had once been his home-field allies. “It was just very typical Patriots-type weather,” he said. “A very tough football environment. They make you earn it.”Frankly, this game was everything Brady went to Florida to get away from — the dour conditions, the grinding nature of the football. By the time the Tampa Bay Buccaneers emerged from it winners by the old-timey score of 19-17, after four lead changes in the fourth quarter, it’s safe to say Brady was relieved to be leaving again. It had been such a long buildup of hype, theater and anticipation, “a very emotional week,” Brady admitted. He had spent 20 years as a New England Patriot, and his children had been “born on Beacon Street,” he said. “These are people I shared my life with.” But then had come that strained parting two years ago, when Belichick wouldn’t meet his terms, and he wouldn’t meet Belichick’s, so he had changed allegiances and his locale to warmer air. It was unfair, the undue emphasis on Brady and Belichick, as if they were the only two who mattered, and as if this were something more than an early regular season game. It fogged up and distorted the pregame lenses like the rain that blurred the cameras. Brady tried to diffuse it, vainly. “It’s not about the quarterback. It’s not about the fans or the home crowd, or relationships of 20 years. It’s about two good football teams going at it,” he said earlier in the week. Nevertheless, the chatter continued. Tampa Bay Coach Bruce Arians called it “frustrating,” because after all, “I don’t think Bill played a snap,” Arians said. And in fact, it was Brady’s supporting cast who won the contest, from Leonard Fournette’s plunging runs to Ryan Succop’s 48-yard field goal with 1:57 to go. As for Brady, he had been less than illustrious, completing 22 of 43 passes for 269 yards, and Arians suggested he had played a little uptight. “Very careful,” Arians said. “He wasn’t going to make any mistakes that cost us the game.
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