FOXBOROUGH - Late in the second quarter, shortly after Terrell Suggs had lunged toward his legs, Tom Brady lobbied for enforcement of the rule named after him. The Patriots quarterback gestured for a penalty, the yellow flag subsequently landing at his feet as if he had just successfully executed a rain dance.

Ask and you shall receive?

“Of course,’’ Brady said yesterday when asked if he thought the play was truly a penalty. “They can’t go low. We learned that lesson [last year].’’

And so here we are, four games into Brady’s return to football with the Patriots holding a 3-1 record, and we are reminded that the on-field cornerstone of this unparalleled Patriots era still does one thing better than anyone. He wins. With yesterday’s 27-21 victory over the Baltimore Ravens, New England improved to a sterling 90-25 in Brady’s 115 starts, a .783 winning percentage that ranks first in the Super Bowl era among quarterbacks with 100 starts. Brady wins by ground, by air, or by penalty, all of which he demonstrated against the Ravens in his ongoing reentry.

Brady ran for one touchdown and threw for another yesterday, the latter contributing to a day in which he completed 21 of 32 passes (65.6 percent) for 258 yards and no interceptions. And though Brady was sacked three times for 24 yards - one produced a fumble that the Ravens recovered for a touchdown - Baltimore twice committed roughing-the-passer penalties that significantly contributed to a New England win.

Thanks to the first such transgression, the Patriots turned a potential fourth and 9 at the Baltimore 37 into Brady’s 1-yard touchdown run and a 10-7 lead.

As a result of the second, New England turned a potential third and 11 at the Baltimore 43 into a 12-yard scamper by Sammy Morris two plays later that gave the Patriots a 17-7 edge.

They never trailed thereafter.

“Without totally going off the wall here, it is embarrassing to the game,’’ said Ravens linebacker Ray Lewis. “Brady is good enough to make his own plays, [so] let him make the play. When you have two great teams that are going at it, let them go at it. Both of their touchdown drives [in the first half] had personal fouls on them that kept the drives alive. Did that win or lose the game? No, but it got them 14 points.’’

All of this brings us back to Brady, to 2007, 2008, and the 2009 season that is starting to serve as a refresher on just who Brady is and what he stands for. Looking back, he never really piled up the personal statistics so much as he did the W’s. During the first six full seasons of his career as a starter, from 2001-06, Brady averaged roughly 25 touchdown passes and 13 interceptions per season. He passed for more than 4,000 yards only once. He was the consummate, team-first quarterback for the consummate, team-first coach, a man who neatly counterbalanced Peyton Manning’s Most Valuable Player Awards with three Lombardi trophies.

Along the way, we asked the inevitable question: What would Brady do if he had Manning’s offense and weapons?

In the two years since, we got our answer - and ones to questions we never cared to ask. During a 2007 campaign that ended the same way so many of Manning’s have, Brady passed for 50 touchdowns and nearly 5,000 yards. He threw a mere eight picks. He nonetheless went home unfulfilled before showing up for the 2008 regular season, when his season was cruelly cut short by a knee injury in the very first quarter of the very first game. The football gods have a funny way of working sometimes; that is what Brady got for jamming two years of production into one year of work.

Today, having seemingly learned the valuable lessons of the last two years, Brady and the Patriots look far more like the quarterback and team from the earlier years of his career. They both seem to be getting better every week. Yesterday, from beginning to end, Brady was more accurate and efficient than he has been in any game this season, the Patriots using an effective mix of run and pass - and, yes, penalties - to defeat a Baltimore team that, like the Atlanta Falcons before it, came into Foxborough unbeaten.

“The job of the quarterback is to lead the team to the end zone,’’ Brady said when asked about the more balanced offense of the last two weeks. “There are a lot of ways to do it.’’

Indeed, for all the Patriots have accomplished in this decade, maybe they lost their way through the fantasy land that was the 2007 regular season, when games were over by halftime and Brady put up video game numbers. Back then, the Patriots threw first and asked questions later, shooting their way to the only undefeated 16-game regular season in history and assaulting the NFL record book with the most prolific offense of all time. Maybe the Patriots and their quarterback forgot the only rule that once mattered in Foxborough, where the games were almost always tight but the outcome rarely changed.

For Brady in particular, with or without the offensive fireworks, the only rule was to win the game.