With about two minutes left in the New England Patriots season Saturday night at Gillette Stadium, the speakers blared the Journey song “Don’t Stop Believin'”.

Maybe it was supposed to be inspirational, hoping to rally a team down 14-13 at the time, one that ended up losing 20-13. Or perhaps it was ironic on purpose, because that same song was played at the end of the Sopranos hit television series run.

We don’t know if this is it for Patriots iconic quarterback Tom Brady. You hope that his last pass in a New England uniform – or his career, for that matter – won’t be a deflected pick six to former teammate Logan Ryan.

Of course, it’s all a guessing game now. We will look for signs every week. Social media postings. An interview here and there. We’ll look for secret meanings, analyze punctuation marks, adjectives, adverbs, letters, etc.

We’ll hope that the “pretty unlikely” and “yeah, hopefully unlikely” have some kind of subliminal message when Brady answered the direct question of whether or not he’d retire.

Here’s a question: Does anyone out there think he should retire? He certainly didn’t have what you might call a Bradyesque year in 2019, and wasn’t able to rescue the Patriots in the playoffs. He lost his last two games vs. opposing QBs Ryan Fitzpatrick and Ryan Tannehill. If yours truly had told you that would have happened, you would have likely called the men in white coats in a flash.

It seems clear, though, Brady is not what he was. How much of that is due to his poor surroundings this season – subpar receivers, no reliable tight end, a patchwork offensive line – remains to be seen.

Of course, on Sunday morning Patriots coach Bill Belichick offered no insight in his final press conference likely until the night of the NFL draft in late April.

“We’ve been working on Tennessee,” he said as part of a somewhat entertaining back-and-forth with the Boston Globe’s Ben Violin. “It’s 12 hours after the game, not going to talk a lot things about the future because it’s not – I’m not prepared to talk about it.”

Belichick called players futures “collective decisions”, and he’s right. There are a lot of factors that go into it.

What should we think? OK, let’s play that game. Brady doesn’t want to retire, he’s a competitor and wants to compete. He also wants to keep that TB12 image alive to us mere mortals. The “hopefully” likely stems from the Patriots giving him a reason not to retire. We don’t think he’d go somewhere else at this point.

“Again, I don’t want to get too much into the future and stuff,” he said. “I mean, this team has fought hard. We battled every day, we tried to get better, we worked hard to improve and I was proud to be a part of this team. Not only this year, but every year.”

How about next year?

“Again,” he said, “I just don’t know what’s going to happen and I’m not going to predict it. No one needs to make choices at this point. I love playing football, I love playing for this team. I’ve loved playing for this team for two decades and winning a lot of games.

“Again, I don’t know what it looks like moving forward, so we’ll just take it day-by-day.”

And each day, through the next two months, especially around Super Bowl Week and then into early to mid-March, the rumor mill will be working overtime. Speculation Nation. Tweets by NFL insiders about this source and that source.

We still don’t know for sure what happened to Tony Soprano in that restaurant with his family, as we’ve had nearly 13 years to speculate back and forth.

Tom Brady, the Patriots, team owner Robert Kraft and Bill Belichick won’t be allowed by NFL rules and Father Time to make us wait that long.

But it may seem like it.

Tom King may be reached at 594-1251, or@Telegraph_TomK, or tking@nashuatelegraph.com