Don’t hate Patrick Mahomes because he’s beautiful.

You were right to resent Tom Brady. But now it’s time to let it go.

Will Leitch is the author of the forthcoming “Lloyd McNeil’s Last Ride,” a contributing editor at New York magazine and founder of

Deadspin.

When I was a kid, my grandfather loved to tell me about heading to Sportsman’s Park in St. Louis and watching Stan Musial play baseball for the Cardinals.

There was awe in his voice, as if he couldn’t believe, decades later, that for one afternoon he was in the same building as the great Stan the Man — that he was able to see him with his own eyes.

“What was it like to watch him?” I asked him.

“I felt special,” he said. “

I knew I’d be telling you about it someday.”

I do not know what the world is going to be like in 30 years.

when my theoretical grandchildren will theoretically ask me what it was like to watch the sports stars of today, how it felt, say, to see Tom Brady in his prime.

Here’s one thing I’m sure of, though.

I will absolutely lie to my grandchildren.

Because, if I were being honest, when they ask me what it was like to watch Tom Brady, I would say, “Oh, we all hated him.

Most of my friends spent the game photoshopping genitals onto his head and posting the images to Twitter.”

Our culture seems specifically designed to tear down greatness, or, at the very least, to get sick of it much more quickly than we once did.

Brady won seven Super Bowls, and it feels like the general public cheered for him only to win the first one.

that stunning upset against the St. Louis Rams in 2002, just months after September 11.

It is widely forgotten how beloved that Patriots team was, how they were the quintessential underdogs.

how America seemed universally behind them.

even unironically arguing that we should cheer for them simply because they had “Patriots” in their name.

(This was a real thing, I swear.)

The reason it’s forgotten is that Brady won another Super Bowl two years after that, and another one the next year.

By then, we had all turned against him.

We want you to win once — but only once.

By the time Brady retired, he was widely reviled by your average sports fan outside of greater Boston.

I guarantee you someone at your Super Bowl party will be hissing at Brady, now Fox’s lead analyst on the broadcast, every time he talks on Sunday.

when the Kansas City Chiefs face the Philadelphia Eagles.

We say we want winners, that we want to honor champions.

But we don’t want those winners eating all the pie.

No one was the target of this you’re-a-pie-hog resentment more than Brady.

Yet now, on Sunday, the Chiefs’ Patrick Mahomes has a chance to do something Brady never did, something Joe Montana never did, something no quarterback has ever done.

win three consecutive Super Bowls.

If Mahomes pulls it off, he will go down in NFL history.

and might replace Brady as the quarterback my grandchildren will be asking me about.

It’s true that a backlash has developed against Mahomes and the Chiefs over the last couple of years, perhaps best captured by a recent piece in New York magazine.

in which writer Jake Nevins argues that the Chiefs are “boring and swagless, smug and exasperating”.

and that — most tellingly — “we’ve reached a saturation point.”

This feels particularly silly considering, well, we just stopped being sick of Brady.

We’re already sick of somebody else?

The backlash toward Mahomes, the more you look at it, starts to feel less like actual animosity toward Mahomes .

and more like sports fans are reaching for a phantom limb now that Brady is gone.

Mahomes has always been a poor replacement for our collective hatred of Brady.

who, with his all-American good looks, supermodel spouse, chiseled physique and essentially vacant public persona, seemed to stand in for every quarterback from everybody’s high schools who seemed to get away with everything.

Mahomes, on the other hand, has always had a certain everyman-ness to him that, until he started winning Super Bowls all the time, America had felt was endearing.

He doesn’t have the inherent physical gifts of a Brady or Peyton Manning.

and he has never looked like the quarterback straight from central casting like Joe Montana or John Elway back in the day.

When he talks, he sounds a little bit like Kermit the Frog.

Undersized at 6-foot-2, Mahomes was the youngest quarterback.

and the second Black quarterback, to win the Super Bowl MVP award.

When all that happened five years ago, it felt like a breakthrough, like he’d bum-rushed the sport and taken over, ending the reign of the Sears catalogue models.

Mahomes still has this everyman quality to him.

He’s not nearly as fast as his Baltimore Ravens counterpart (and fellow MVP) Lamar Jackson, and he has become famous for his “Dad Bod,” a less-than-peak-athleticism physique that has become so well-known that Coors Light did a “Dad Bod” advertisement with Mahomes last year.

 At the Super Bowl Media Day this week, he even signed a pillow with a picture of his “Dad Bod” on it. It’s fair to say.

Tom Brady and Peyton Manning weren’t doing “Dad Bod” ads.

The problem is solely that Mahomes just keeps winning.

The backlash to him exists only because all the victories — he is appearing in his fifth Super Bowl in six years.

and he won three of the first four — make him seem like less of an underdog than he really is.

All the arguments against Mahomes come down to that: We’re sick of him.

If the Eagles’ Jalen Hurts wins this Super Bowl, we’ll rejoice for him .

unless he comes back and tries to win it again next year, in which case he’ll be our next villain.

This flies in the face of everything, for generations, we have claimed to admire about athletes.

In the long run, we claim to want to witness history, to see the greats show off their greatness on the grandest possible stage, as many times as possible.

We want Tom Brady, Michael Jordan, LeBron James, Derek Jeter.

But really, we want to look back and remember them — to be nostalgic for the way they were.

In the short run, in the now, on this Super Bowl Sunday, we want whatever the new thing is.

Which is why we jeer our champions, why we draw genitals on their heads.

why we nitpick greatness as being smug and dull when it’s anything but.

There’s nothing wrong with Patrick Mahomes other than the fact that he keeps winning.

That feels like our problem, not his.

That’s what I’ll tell the grandkids, anyway.