Yes, I said it about two weeks ago.

“Even I’m ticked off at Brett Favre.”

This was after all the reports, early this month, of him calling officials and players of the Minnesota Vikings and telling them that his ankle wasn’t sound enough for him to play … that he was going to have to retire.

And it wasn’t just that we had to tear up two inside pages on deadline in Abu Dhabi.

I was genuinely annoyed by this guy who has made a habit of threatening/promising to retire, and then jerking people around by changing his mind.

Before, it seemed like someone else’s problem. Because 1) I’m not really an NFL fan anymore, and haven’t been since the Rams and Raiders left Los Angeles after the 1994 season, and 2) it had been several years since I had to deal with making news decisions on the editing side about how to treat Favrian rumors in a print publication.

We had a column about Favre already on the page. Edited, photo chosen, headline written.

As originally written, Mike Tierney’s opinion piece suggested that getting angry with Favre’s inability to make a decision about his future was silly when the league has so many quarterbacks who appear to be genuinely bad actors. (Take bows, Ben Roethlisburger and Michael Vick and JaMarcus Russell …)

So, on deadline, Tierney came up with a new lead, fudging the “he hasn’t decided thing” at the very moment that ESPN was running a Favre retrospective …

And it wasn’t just having to deal with this guy on deadline that annoyed me. It was the whole faux drama of it.  As if he really got a buzz from seeing everyone scurry.

But, now, as he has (apparently) pulled another U-turn and reported to camp (that $16.5 million, guaranteed, might have had something to do with it) … I’m thinking, “Oh, what the heck. He makes the NFL more interesting.”

But, absolutely, we’ve reached one of those “fool me once … well, foul me thrice” points where no one — no one — is going to believe he is retired until the NFL has played, like, two full seasons without him in uniform, and photos come back from Hattiesburg showing Ol’ No. 4 with an enormous beer gut hanging over his belt and a stogie hanging from his mouth as he stands over a putt at some posh golf course in a foursome with Charles Barkley, Michael Jordan and John Madden.

And even then I won’t be sure. But is that bad? When you’re on deadline, it is. The rest of the time, and I think I am in accord with NFL fans, it’s more like … “Hey, the old man is back! This is gonna be interesting!”