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Ed. note: This piece comes courtesy Eric Snider.

Unless you just got released from a Supermax prison, you know that Tony Dungy retired from coaching yesterday. It’s on 1A of both local dailies, with extensive coverage on the sports pages. It’s the lead story on TV sports nationally.

Dungy’s retirement is especially big news in Tampa Bay, where he’s a revered — make that adored — figure in the community. While his profile will be lower, of course, folks in this area are excited to see him return.

Dungy deserves the adulation. He rescued the Tampa Bay Bucs from the dregs, and did so with class and integrity. Even during his tenure as coach of the Indianapolis Colts, he maintained strong ties to Tampa Bay.

He’s been canonized throughout the media, and there’s little I can add at this point, other than to agree with most all of it.

When a much-loved icon moves on, we like to indulge in a nice helping of sentimentality. And that doesn’t exclude journalists. Along with the sentimentality comes a share of revisionist history.

Most Bucs fans still lament the day that the Glazer family clumsily fired Dungy. After seven years under Jon Gruden, the overall attitude is that Dungy was fired prematurely, not given a chance to finish the job. Further, the fact that Gruden led the Bucs to a Super Bowl win the year after Dungy got the boot is now often accompanied with an asterisk: “He did it with Dungy’s team.”

Although there’s some merit to that argument, it fits tidily into the revisionist history.

Here’s the real history as I remember it: There was little significant outpouring of protest when Dungy was fired following a 9-8 2001 campaign. After six seasons, his reclamation project of the most woeful franchise in NFL history was considered finished; gratitude for that was replaced by criticism that he couldn’t take the team to the promised land. Folks had grown used to the team getting into the playoffs — and they wanted more. They saw Dungy’s placid demeanor as a detriment, that he didn’t have the necessary fire to push his team to the pinnacle.

Dungy’s poker face drove me a little batty too. I recall thinking he got a raw deal in the way the team handled his ouster, but also figured it was probably time for him to go. I was pretty amped when the animated Gruden replaced him.

Would the last seven years have been better had Dungy stayed? No way to say, of course, but I suspect that they would’ve yielded a more consistent Buccaneers team. I’m not so sure, however, that the franchise would have a championship trophy in its case. Gruden came along at just the right time and provided the perfect spark.

That said, Dungy (cliché alert) leaves the game more respected as a man than as a football coach, and that’s no easy feat. (Do you think they’ll say the same thing about Bill Parcels? Gruden?)

I always admired how Dungy publicly displayed his deep Christian commitment. It was so much a fiber of his being that he handled it organically, and rarely seemed to proselytize. Neither did he do the perfunctory post-game interview lead-off — “First, I’d like to thanks my Lord and savior Jesus Christ” — and then launch into self-aggrandizement.

I wrote a handful of stories on the Bucs during the Dungy regime that required me to do locker room interviews. I found out that, while the Bucs were viewed as a “God Squad” among NFL teams, with plenty of devout Christians in their midst, the ones who were not so inclined didn’t feel pressure to join the ranks of the pious. Even the heathens loved their coach.

When Dungy was hired by Indianapolis after the Bucs cut him loose, the Colts immediately became my second favorite team. My admiration for Dungy had been cemented fairly early in his tenure, when I wrote a cover story on him for this paper (then called the Weekly Planet). It was in the late 1990s, during the preseason of either his second or third season as head coach.

I found it surprisingly easy for a writer from an alternatively weekly paper to set up a private, sit-down interview with a busy NFL head coach. Dungy gave me an attentive 45 minutes in between practices. He was genial and polite, then posed quickly for a few photos.

The story came out on the Thursday before the Bucs’ home opener. I scored a seat in the press box. As I recall, Tampa Bay notched a hard-fought, come-from-behind victory.

I joined the press herd in the post-game locker room and just stood around observing — no interviews to do, no deadlines to meet. I watched Dungy walk through the throng of boisterous players and coaches — smiling and shaking hands.

After a few minutes, he started walking deliberately in my direction. He arrived, warmly shook my hand and smiled. I offered quick congratulations on the victory. Dungy then said, “That was a really good story. Thank you. And my family thanks you.”

After a couple more pleasantries, he moved on.

The encounter left me wondering: How many NFL coaches in the throes of a post-game locker room celebration would’ve recognized an alt-weekly writer he’d spent less than an hour with, then walked over and offered a heartfelt thank-you.

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