In the realm of fantasy football, this reality hits hard

Everybody deals with grief differently.

Jeff Larnard chose denial.

His friends decided to do a live fantasy football draft about an hour before the Patriots opened their season against Kansas City Sunday afternoon.

Larnard had the fourth pick. LaDainian Tomlinson, Adrian Peterson, and Peyton Manning were already off the board.

A lot of names were out there, but Larnard thought Tom Brady would be the safe pick.

"I didn't think he was going to have as good of a year as he had last year," said Larnard, a 20-year-old junior at UMass-Amherst. "But it's still going to be a steal."

Five minutes passed.

"I thought it was a good pick," he said.

Ten minutes.

"I thought I was going to get good value."

Fifteen.

"I even picked up Wes Welker as one of my receivers," he said.

Then came the in-game alert.

"My stomach dropped," he said.

"Being a Pats fan it obviously hurts not having Tom Brady. But me spending a first-round pick on him, that hurt even more."

According to Las Vegas Sports Consultants, the Patriots were a preseason 5-2 favorite to win the Super Bowl. After news of Brady's season-ending knee injury, the odds shot to 15-1.

Fantasy team owners don't need oddsmakers. They knew their season was shot.

The only thing that stopped Brian Tahmosh from crying was that he was staying at his grandmother's house in Pennsylvania a day before starting his new job at Lehigh University.

"I was probably on the verge of tears when they showed the play because I knew how bad it was," he said.

He had used the second overall pick of his draft on Brady. After seeing the replay of the hit by Chiefs safety Bernard Pollard, he still found himself calling around for updates even though he already knew the answer.

"No one knew what was going on," Tahmosh said. "But one of my friends said it looked like Carson Palmer, and that's all I needed to hear."

He started a half-hearted search for a replacement, but after having Brady last year when he set an NFL record with 50 touchdown passes, Tahmosh was already mentally prepared for a season without his star QB. "I always said if I picked Brady, don't worry about picking a backup because if he goes there goes my team."

For a guy that dropped $100 on his league, Sam Leroy was cool after losing Brady. His philosophy: "Fantasy football's no different than real football. You can always find a replacement for somebody."

His team still won its opening game, and since there were only 12 teams and 12 quarterback spots, he was already eyeing Jacksonville's David Garrard as a replacement.

"Tom Brady goes down and you've still got Matt Cassel throwing to Randy Moss," said the 23-year-old Cambridge native and Emerson graduate. "You still have Cassel throwing to Wes Welker. Those guys are still playing. So as far as I'm concerned, if you believe Randy Moss is still going to get 1,000 yards and 10 touchdowns, you've got to believe somebody's throwing them to him."

Nobody realized that faster than Maximo Patiño, a 32-year-old who works for Syracuse University.

His opening-week opponent started Brady. As soon as Patiño saw Brady go down, he sifted through the list of free agent quarterbacks.

By 5:38 that afternoon, Cassel was the newest quarterback for "MBisons."

The way Patiño's league works, yardage is just as important as touchdowns, and the guy who gets the ball to Randy Moss can be just as lethal as Moss himself.

"So God bless Tom Brady," he said, "But I've got Matt Cassel."