Bill Belichick is gone and Tom Brady is long gone, but they are still the Patriots, who cast a shadow over the Jets that stretched from the day Belichick quit them almost until the day he finally left Foxboro. Now they are back at MetLife Stadium on Thursday night and the Aaron Rodgers era at MetLife, even if it only lasts a year or two, isn’t supposed to begin with a loss to a Patriots team that doesn’t have that guy coaching and that guy behind center. The best way, and that means the very best way, for the Jets to begin their home season, one year after the last home opener went as wrong as anything ever has in Jets history — which is saying plenty — is for Rodgers and the Jets to put one on this version of the Patriots. If they can, that is. The Patriots, with Jerod Mayo as their coach now and Jacoby Brissett playing quarterback until Drake Maye is ready, come into this game with a 1-1 record. So do the Jets. But the Patriots one victory has more value than the Jets’, just because theirs came on the road against the Bengals. And their loss on Sunday came in overtime against a good Seahawks team. The feeling coming into the season was that the Patriots would again be the worst team in the AFC East, after having been the best once Belichick and Brady did get together. But maybe not so fast. The Jets? They got bullied by the 49ers in San Francisco before finally putting away the Titans in Nashville. Rodgers made some throws. Will Levis, the Titans’ quarterback, made enough bad throws himself and bad decisions you started to wonder how the Jets missed out on drafting him. So the Jets got a win they sure needed to get, a win that meant that they got to come home to Jersey and not be looking at the prospect of starting Rodgers’ first real season as a Jet at 0-3. They happened to get a win against the Titans on a day when Rodgers’ stats were almost identical to the ones that Daniel Jones put into the books on Sunday against the Commanders. Jones was 16-for-28, 178 passing yards, two touchdowns, no interceptions. Rodgers was 18-for-30 against the Titans, 176 passing yards, two touchdowns, no interceptions. The only reason Jones’ team isn’t 1-1 today is because Rodgers had a better team around him, and a real kicker. Of course we are still in that honeymoon period with Rodgers where it is almost a local ordinance to talk about how he’s still knocking the rust off his game after he effectively went 20 months without being in a real game. That is still the narrative around here, not his age, not the fact that he is coming back from an Achilles injury, one of the most serious in sports, not as spotty as his play has been in the first two games. Really, we are still in the place where Rodgers gets to tell us what we are seeing from him and from the Jets and what we’re supposed to think about all that. “We’re early in the process, unfortunately,” Rodgers said after the Titans game. “We haven’t put it together.” It is early in the process, he and the Jets just two games in the way everybody else is. Every time Mister Rodgers does complete some passes and the Jets do have a good drive — there haven’t been a lot of those in the first two games — it is treated as if he is the Rodgers of old and not a 40-year-old Rodgers. Maybe it’s too early in the process for him to have a game where he throws for more than 200 yards or even 300 and three scores. But it would certainly put a charge into MetLife and into his fan base if he can do that on Thursday night. “It doesn’t have to be pretty,” is something else he said after the Titans game. But pretty wouldn’t hurt when it is once again the Jets against the Patriots; when the Jets are playing their first division game, in a division they clearly think they can take from the Bills and the Patriots, and especially with Tua Tagovailoa on the injured list for the Dolphins, in a season that may already have gone wrong in South Florida. If Rodgers stays healthy this season, the Jets are supposed to be better than the Patriots. They are supposed to make the playoffs with the talent they have on both sides of the ball, even though if you’re big enough and mobile enough to still play on a defensive line, you might want to send Joe Douglas, the Jets general manager, a text. But if the Jets don’t become a legitimate Super Bowl contender in the next two years — and that means before Rodgers turns 42 — then what Jets fans will be looking at is their team drafting another young quarterback and starting all over — again — and hasn’t that worked out great for them with Sam Darnold and Zach Wilson. The Jets really are supposed to make a serious run at a title in the AFC East this season and certainly next, because if they can’t or won’t, what was the point of making this trade? In the end, Rodgers will have merely become a placeholder in the endless quest for the Next Namath. For now, though, he is that guy. Brett Favre came here from Green Bay and was 9-7 and Rodgers is supposed to do better than that, better than another aging legend who threw 22 interceptions to go with 22 touchdown passes as a Jet. No. 8 is supposed to light things up this season. No better time to start doing that than Thursday night. Belichick gone. Brady gone. It’s still them.