The debate is over.

With four Super Bowl championships in an era designed to prevent sustained excellence, Bill Belichick and Tom Brady are the greatest coach and quarterback in NFL history.

Now, the equally indisputable truth: Such debates are stupid.

Professional football is the ultimate team game. Apologies to baseball, but in a universe where the athletes have never been bigger, stronger and faster, it is the ultimate game of inches.

Have either of those truths ever been more evident than Sunday evening in Glendale?

Brady was sensational, setting a Super Bowl record for completions and directing two heart-in-your-throat touchdown drives in the fourth quarter of the New England Patriots’ 28-24 comeback victory over the Seattle Seahawks.

He was nowhere near perfect, though, throwing two brutal interceptions – one stunting a sure Patriots’ scoring drive, the other leading to Seattle points.

And even without the 10 o’clock heroics, Brady would have been relegated to another walk of shame through turquoise and neon green confetti without Malcolm Butler’s goal-line interception in the closing seconds.

Two plays earlier, Butler’s nearly perfect defense was foiled by Jermaine Kearse’s ridiculous catch. If that didn’t give you palpitations and bad flashbacks, either you’re one of those pink-hat fans, or you simply haven’t been paying attention.

You’d be forgetting about David Tyree’s helmet in 2008 and Mario Manningham’s sticky fingertips in 2012. New England dreams have been crushed by a wideout’s combination of luck and skill more than once.

Butler redeemed himself for, well, I guess for not reaching behind his back to swat the ball out of thin air, picking off Russell Wilson after the Seahawks inexplicably didn’t feed it to Marshawn Lynch on second-and-goal from the 1.

With that, the Patriots’ decade-long title drought was over. But did it make Brady and Belichick any better than they would be, in perpetuity, if Lynch had punched it in and grabbed his private parts before a worldwide audience? Not one scintilla.

Quarterbacks don’t pick off passes or make tackles to punctuate a goal-line stand. Sometimes it’s about the clock and bounces you don’t control. Remember that, next time you’re tempted to pull a Doug Baldwin touchdown celebration and … crap on the accomplishments of Peyton Manning, Brett Favre, Dan Marino, or any other hall of fame signal-caller with one or zero rings.

This was a better team than the one twice beaten by the New York Giants. That’s baffling, on the surface, when you consider that one of those squads started the season 18-0.

But the 2014 version had more playmakers on both sides of the ball. This one had Julian Edelman, who officially made himself a Boston Sports Legend on Sunday night, and a healthy Rob Gronkowski, whose mere presence as an all-galaxy tight end created space for the Pats’ cadre of receivers.

Those teams had defensive liabilities, to be generous. This one had gang-tackling sensibilities and a secondary that was both fast and physical.

Brady received too much credit for the first three New England titles – each ultimately won off the foot of Adam Vinatieri – and too much blame for two losses in which he wasn’t on the field for the decisive play.

Neither he nor his coach needed this victory to validate anything about their careers. All they did was keep the Seahawks from winning back-to-back championships, running their mouth for another year and injecting themselves into a hypothetical greatest-team-of-all-time discussion.

That’s their most beautiful accomplishment of all, come to think of it. If you witnessed the sorry display at the end of the game, you know there’s no debate there, either.

Kalle Oakes is a staff writer. His email is koakes@sunjournal.com. Follow him on Twitter @Oaksie72.

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