The content of this article is going to make you feel things. Apologies for that.

Recently Tony Romo was a guest on an episode of Pardon My Take, a rare podcast appearance of this variety for the former Dallas Cowboys quarterback. As you can imagine Romo touched on a number of topics throughout the interview, many centered around his broadcasting career, but his time under center for America’s Team was also on the menu.

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At one point Romo was asked about how he chose retirement (and working for CBS) over joining another NFL team. To be clear, for anyone unaware or with foggy memories, this was the 2017 offseason. Dak Prescott had just wrapped his rookie season with the Cowboys and the team formalizing him being their starting quarterback by releasing Romo which led to him being a free agent.

Many thought that Romo would join the Denver Broncos or Houston Texans at the time. It appears that he legitimately considered it as he said that he did. Romo noted ultimately that he chose not to pursue those opportunities because, in his words, it wouldn’t have been the same.

“I’m not a guy with big regrets, I guess you could say. The only regret I guess I would have is that… my job was to bring a Super Bowl to Dallas and I didn’t do it. So that always sticks with me a little bit. Because you give your whole body, heart, soul, everything into it.”

“And you just wanted that for… all the fans. The Joneses. For everybody that you’re around. And so that one always sticks with me a little bit just because I had that opportunity and just wasn’t able to do it. So that part of it kind of still… sits there.”

“But at the end it was like… I could go somewhere else and do it. Because I was like, I gotta win a Super Bowl. It’s literally what you play the game for. Nothing else matters.”

“And it just was like… but would that be the same? If I went somewhere else and did it?”

“Because at that point I’d known the game at such a high level. My last 20, 25 games, we were pretty successful. When healthy. But I was getting injured more often. Body breaks down in some ways through the years.”

“…I think just… it was as simple as it just wouldn’t feel as… important… it would be important to me, but it was for the people I was around. All the fans that we had.”

Right in the chest, man.

It is certainly admirable that Romo considered playing for the Cowboys to be so special to him that pursuing a championship elsewhere, and even the idea of winning one, would not hit the same. I think we can all empathize with that in our own ways in our own lives.

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There are some younger Cowboys fans now who didn’t live through the Romo days. They were special in the most unpredictable way. It is hard to fully capture how special and unpredictable they were.

Shout out Tony Romo. Shout out this answer.