Brett Favre Epic Won't End in Championship Glory

o call him a drama queen is to underplay the infuriating, suffocating absurdity of it all. In truth, Brett Favre is a freak show, a pampered, self-centered, 40-year-old child who at least is acknowledging that the sports public is universally disgusted by his annual play-or-retire tease. He used to be cool and unassuming, a country boy who showed up for camp without fuss and spent every season aw-shucking his way to more tales for his folk legend.

Now? It's as if he just discovered the new media down yonder in Mississippi and wants to squeeze every agitated sigh out of our tweets, chat rooms, comments sections and talk-radio audiences.

"This is the last year of my contract,'' he said during a news conference Wednesday, though no one believes it's necessarily his last year of football, "and I'm sure a lot of people are like, 'Yes!' -- including my family.''

It isn't the fact he's returning that bothers us. It's what Favre persists in doing in the offseason, a come-and-get-me charade that plunged to insulting lows this week. Much as we love watching him play, in a incomparable career that we'll all take admiringly to our rocking chairs, Favre should have been ashamed when Minnesota Vikings management felt compelled to summon the company plane and send three veterans on a recruiting trip to his Hattiesburg spread. They all but begged him to come back -- offensive lineman Steve Hutchinson, defensive end Jared Allen and kicker Ryan Longwell, all good friends of Favre -- and as they wooed him during a Jeep ride across his property, they found a man claiming to have little interest in subjecting his aching, battered body to a 20th year of NFL torture. How interested was he in returning to the Vikings when the trio arrived Tuesday?