Mike Celizic

There are times in sports when a story is so good, so compelling, that it doesn’t matter for what team the central character plays. It can be your fiercest rival, the team you hate worse than a dog hates getting its temperature taken, and still you have to root for that person.

Such a story is that of Tedy Bruschi, the New England linebacker who suffered a stroke after the Pro Bowl last year and on Wednesday will resume practicing with his team.

Injuries are as common in football as snow is in Buffalo winters. It’s not a question of whether a player will get hurt, but of when and how badly. So common are torn ligaments and broken bones and dislocated shoulders and torn cartilage that we hardly blink at them. It’s never a question of if a player will come back, but when.

But Bruschi’s injury was to his brain. One day he’s playing in the NFL’s all-star game. The next, he could hardly see and barely walk. Football at that instant ceased meaning anything to him. His concern was being able to see his children, not being able to read the quarterback’s eyes.

It was as big a loss as the Patriots or any team could have. Bruschi was to the New England defense what Tom Brady was to the offense. He was the captain of the defense, a leader in spirit, emotion and performance. When the Pats needed a big play on defense, Bruschi always seemed to make it, whether it was ripping the ball from the grasp of a receiver, picking off a key pass, dropping the quarterback for a big loss or simply stuffing a short-yardage run.

The Pats had absorbed big losses of personnel, from Lawyer Milloy to Ty Law to Rodney Harrison, but losing Bruschi was losing more than a player. It was losing the team’s heart and soul.

And yet New England fans didn’t really care about that, not when the word came back that he had suffered a stroke. All they cared about was their hero getting better. When people first started to talk about him possibly returning next year, most true fans were more worried that he could suffer serious and permanent damage than they were about the effect his absence had on the team. Better that Tedy Bruschi live a full and productive life than that he risk further damage to what Woody Allen called his second favorite organ — his brain.

And now he’s coming back, not next year or at some indeterminate date, but right now. He’ll start practicing Wednesday, work through the team’s bye week, and then play whenever coach Bill Belichick decides he can help the team.

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He hasn’t been through training camp, and, although he’s been working in the weight room and is in good shape, he’s not in football shape. He hasn’t pulled on the pads, has neither absorbed nor given a hit, hasn’t made the instant decisions and trusted in instinct and knowledge and reflexes that are the difference between playing well and not playing at all.

And yet, the Patriots need him. They’re a battered and hurting hulk right now, a championship team without many of its champion players.

It’s always been accepted wisdom that the genius of Belichick’s way of playing football is that his team can lose a player and plug another in who can get the job done. We believed that because it had always been so.

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But as elegant as Belichick’s schemes are, they require not just men who can play football, but men who can make football plays. Brady is one of those people, the one man on offense without whom the team could not function at a championship level. On defense, there were more such players, and the two biggest playmakers were Rodney Harrison and Bruschi. When Bruschi went down, it was a staggering blow. When Harrison also went out early in the year, it was devastating.