Brett Favre is gone now – and the NFL is much less interesting as a result. Tipsheet is sad today and so are sportswriters from coast to coast.

Many scribes are lamenting his retirement. Here is a small sampling of the tributes he received in print and on the Internet:

Bill Plaschke, Los Angeles Times: “With his plays drawn in the dirt and his passes slung wildly from the hip, Favre, 38, played quarterback the way we’ve all played quarterback. Our backyard was his crowded stadium, and our trash cans were his goal posts, but our dreams seemed to be the same. Favre played for the fun. Favre played for the recklessness. Favre played for the delight of running around a big patch of grass on a Sunday afternoon. Other quarterbacks are always trying to redesign the game. Favre, alone, played it as it was invented. He was the anti-Manning. He was the alter-Brady.”

Gene Wojciechowski, ESPN.com:  “It would have been nice if the final pass of his 17-season career hadn’t been intercepted. Or if the final game of his football life hadn’t been a loss in overtime. Or if the lingering memory of that Jan. 20 NFC Championship hadn’t been of Brett Favre looking as though he’d just been removed from the frozen food section of your local grocery store. But Favre has always defied logic. He played when his body begged him not to. He threw passes into slivers of daylight, or no light at all. And he retired when it seemed there was every reason for him to return for an 18th season.”

Jay Mariotti, Chicago Sun-Times: “We’ve pegged him as a simple study, a 38-year-old kid running barefoot around the backyard in an enduring Mississippi adolescence. In truth, Brett Favre is a bafflingly complex man, never more so than on the day he left football. His career was a celebration of joy, creativity and survival, making him one of the most popular icons of American life, and yet, in the end, he leaves us shocked, disappointed and befuddled. Why would he retire NOW?”

Steve Serby, New York Post: “He made a tiny Mississippi town called Kiln famous, and never stopped beating the odds. There was a time when he drank too much, there was an addiction to Vicodin, there was the sudden death of his father to a heart attack, there was his wife’s battle with breast cancer, there was a life-threatening car accident, all that. He was standing at the end anyway, and left standing tall on his own terms.”

Mark Kriegel, FoxSports.com: “No game ages men as mercilessly as professional football, which systematically inflicts orthopedic and neurological ruin on its most dedicated performers. Quarterbacks, whose success depends on an ability to take the blindside hit, are the most vulnerable. Again, it’s worth repeating the words of Joe Namath, who on the eve of Super Bowl III declared: ‘The name of the game is ‘kill the quarterback.’’ So it was. So it shall ever be. Game plans are devoted to the quarterback’s destruction. But across all those years, Favre proved indestructible.”

MYSTERIES OF THE UNIVERSE

Questions to cover while wondering if Aaron Rodgers is ready to replace one of the great sports icons in our lifetime?

• What possible good could come from the Blues’ nine-game road trip?
• Is there a worse feeling than tending goal while your team is facing a 3-on-6 disadvantage? Or a better feeling than surviving that onslaught?
• Now that the Rams have invested heavily in Jacob Bell, what do they do with Mark Setterstrom?

ALSO, WE DON’T NEED PUDDING

Arkansas coach John Pelphrey refuses to use youth as an excuse for his team’s poor play on the road.

“We don’t need mommy cutting the corners off our bread all the time, OK?” he told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. “We don’t need our chicken nuggets cut up so we can eat them in small pieces.”

NO “WE” IN NIT

Florida is the defending basketball champion . . . well, sort of. The Gators lost their top six scorers from that team.

The Replacements have lost five of their last eight games, putting their NCAA Tournament hopes in peril.

“We all know what’s at stake,” freshman forward Adam Allen told the Associated Press Monday. “We know we’ve got to win some games to get in the tournament. Nobody wants to go to the NIT. It’s like the champion of the losers if you win that. Everybody wants to play in the NCAA tournament.”

MEGAPHONE

“There are definitely times when you’re bummed out. You feel like it’s going to take forever to get it figured out and turned around. Your whole career you’ll go through that. You go through slumps - I mean, I started off a season in LA 0 for 25. That’s just an awful feeling. You’ve got to keep plugging along. This game will chew you up and spit you out.”

Red Sox outfielder J.D. Drew, telling the Boston Globe about the mental and emotional challenges of playing the game.