For football fans in the Upper Midwest, Brett Favre's retirement is an earthquake. Suddenly the landscape looks crumpled and a big chunk of the terra firma has disappeared.

Tuesday we learned that a voice echoing somewhere under Favre's bristly buzz cut accomplished something no hulking linebacker ever could -- made him want to stop playing football.

This is a blow to the mythicism if not the business of the NFL. There are better quarterbacks than Favre in football history and in the NFL today, but few since Johnny Unitas quit lacing up his black high tops have channeled such disparate muses as Forrest Gump and Horatio Alger, and no quarterback has ever so effectively embodied the traits that sports fans want to see in their stars.

Favre is and ever shall be the populist quarterback. He became a pitchman for Wrangler Jeans, not Rolls Royce. He gave us a humble back story that started in the backwater of Kiln, Miss. He played at Southern Mississippi and prompted his first NFL team, the Atlanta Falcons, to trade him because he partied harder than he practiced.

He was the funny kid with the funny drawl until the Green Bay Packers inserted him into a game on Sept. 20, 1992. The kid threw a game-winning touchdown pass that arrived faster than a text message, and he ran downfield celebrating like a game-show contestant.

Soon Favre was receiving accolades that would become all too familiar -- he loves football, he's like a little kid out there, he throws so hard his receivers' hands hurt.

The words became clichés. The guy never did.

While the sports world turned ugly and self-referential, while wide receivers started celebrating 5-yard catches, safeties thumped their chests, and even rich, champion athletes cited their foremost motivation as proving people wrong, Favre kept showing the face of sporting joy.

He wanted to play every snap. He wanted the ball in his right hand in the fourth quarter. When he threw a touchdown pass, he jumped into the arms of a teammate or sprinted to the end zone. When he got sacked by a star player, he'd slap the guy's helmet or bump facemasks.

Aaron Rodgers leading the Pack into the Metrodome will not feel the same. No matter the teams' fortunes, football fans in Minnesota could always look forward to two pulse-quickening games a year -- Vikings at Packers, and Packers at Vikings.

The Metrodome is a drab place, but when Favre leaned forward to take a snap under the Teflon roof, the dumpy ol' Dome felt like the center of the sports world. When Favre took the field at Lambeau, you could feel an entire state exult.

While he lived a life none of us could imagine, Favre was forced to publicly deal with despair, making him more human than, say, Tom Brady, who is known for dating supermodels, or Peyton Manning, who was born into an affluent football family.

Favre almost died in a car accident in college. He became addicted to Vicodin. He played the night after his father died, throwing for 399 yards and four touchdowns before crying on national TV. His wife contracted breast cancer. His hometown was destroyed by a hurricane.

Favre played through it all, for 275 consecutive games, including playoffs, a record even more improbable than its owner.

A favorite Favre memory: He broke the NFL record for touchdown passes last year at the Dome, changing the play call at the line of scrimmage and hitting a remarkably open Greg Jennings for the score. The audible and throw transpired at the speed of light.

Another: After his late touchdown beat the Vikings at the Dome in 2004, he slipped on a T-shirt, jeans and a ski cap and conducted a quick interview.

Then, as his taller, thicker teammates dressed and celebrated, he walked by, slapping hands. He was unshaven, surprisingly compact in person, and if you hadn't known better, you would have thought he was the guy assigned to clean the locker room, not the guy who had just quieted the stadium.

Favre had demons, and sometimes he played with the wasteful recklessness of a lottery winner at a craps table. It's fitting that he won his first game with a dramatic TD pass and ended his last with an interception. He played NFL games the way most of us would play touch football, knowing the beer would taste better if you won, knowing you'd want to make a play you could brag about while standing around the grill.

One more Favre memory: In the playoffs this year against Seattle, Favre scrambled through the snow to his right, started stumbling and felt a defender drawing near. He flipped a pass underhand to a receiver he couldn't have seen, then flopped, face-first, on the tundra.

He threw a few snowballs that day, too. If you're going to play a game for a living, Favre always seemed to be saying, shouldn't you have a little fun?

Jim Souhan can be heard Sundays from 10 a.m.-noon on AM-1500 KSTP. • jsouhan@startribune.com