Bear with me for a moment.

Let’s say that Employee A works for Company B and for the past 16 years has produced results and broken sales records.

Let’s then say that Employee A considers retirement and no longer wants to work for Company B.

Employee A then retires, only to return to work shortly after with Company C, which of course Company B isn’t happy about.

After a solid, but not great year with Company C, Employee A then retires again.

Employee A then considers returning to the workforce, then decides against it and repeats this kind of indecisive behavior for months and months and months before showing up for practice, I mean for work, at Company D, which is the crosstown rival for Company B.

In his work debut at Company D, Employee A makes only one sale out of four attempts, but still enjoys the mass popularity from the coworkers and fans that he did while working for Company B.

In the real world, after the first retirement, most employers would no longer take a chance on employee A and would let him retire even if he didn’t want to.

It’s not worth taking a chance on someone who can’t make up his mind, and it simply isn’t fair to the company and to everyone else.

But in the NFL, such isn’t the case.

A seasoned, proven quarterback is few and far between and on a team like the Vikings, which has many good pieces to its puzzle, but is still looking for the key piece, someone like Brett Favre, I mean Employee A, is a welcomed addition.

And here we are, in the middle of preseason, with the Vikings fresh off a win thanks in part to the efforts of Employee Z, a second-tier quarterback who is now a little more than an afterthought.

Favre didn’t do much in Friday night’s game, although it was only his first contest back.

But Favre mania is still alive and well in the Twin Cities as it should.

Five thousand No. 4 purple jerseys have been sold, and the fan base that used to cringe at the sight of the Wrangler poster boy is now hoping he returns to his MVP form.

The hope is that Favre can provide the sort of miracle Minnesota fans have been craving for a long time. He’s the Joe Mauer now of the Vikings, and anything less than a playoff berth would be a let down.

Is it unfair for the fans to have such high hopes? Not any more unfair than it was for Favre to keep stringing teams along in his “I’m retired, but not really phase.”

The bottom line is that Favre is here now, fans are excited and the buzz around the purple and gold is bigger right now than it has been for a long, long time.

That’s good for Minnesota, at least for this year, because who knows when Employee A will decide to retire again and wind up with someone like the Chicago Bears, I mean Company E.