By Tobias Carroll For a span of 41 days, Tom Brady was retired from professional football. Then he wasn’t anymore. Brady’s return from retirement is one of the highest-profile examples of an athlete doing so — though admittedly, he wasn’t away from the sport for as long as, say, Michael Jordan was when he made his comeback. Still, there was a period for a little over a month when most laypeople could safely assume that Brady’s career had reached its ending. Cinema buffs may recall the opening scene of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia, in which Ricky Jay’s narrator rattles off an escalating seri…