With Deflategate behind them, it was time for the Patriots to move on. An entirely new NFL season is just a week away, bringing with it a slew of narrative threads to replace the various chapters of the ongoing "Cheating Patriots" saga.
Until this morning, when ESPN put up a story from their magazine that breathed life back into the Spygate storyline of 2007, connecting it to the more recent Deflategate controversy.
If Roger Goodell and the NFL's response to accusations that Tom Brady and the Patriots had deflated footballs prior to their 2015 AFC Championship game against the Colts seemed overzealous, that's because, according to the article, it was serving as Goodell's "makeup call" after going soft on New England for 2007's "Spygate" scandal (in which Bill Belichick and the Patriots came under fire for organizing the filming of opposing team's practices).