The Cardinals’ Kurt Warner, left, looking for a receiver as the Vikings’ Jared Allen closes in last Sunday, is enjoying a rebirth.

AP / Ross D. Franklin

FOXBORO –– For many NFL players, seven years is a career — the amount of time they stick around the league and get to say they’re a professional football player.

Not so for Kurt Warner.

For Warner, the Arizona Cardinals’ quarterback, seven years is the amount of time between the last time he was selected to the Pro Bowl and this week, when he learned he had been selected to the league’s all-star game for the fourth time in his career.

The 37-year-old, who went from grocery store clerk to leader of the Greatest Show on Turf, the St. Louis Rams, in 1999, is enjoying a career rebirth in the Arizona desert. He throws to a pair of receivers who will make the trip to Hawaii with him for the Pro Bowl, and he has led the Cardinals to their first playoff berth since 1975.

Warner beat out highly touted 2006 first-round draft pick Matt Leinart for the Cardinals’ starting job, and has completed better than 68 percent of his passes, for 4,290 yards, 26 touchdowns and 13 interceptions. He has thrown at least one touchdown pass in 22 straight games.

Arizona second-year head coach Ken Whisenhunt feels Warner’s resurgence is a credit to his competitive spirit.

“I’m surprised that he’s been as proficient this year, because not many quarterbacks throw the ball as well as he’s thrown it this year, with the accuracy and number of touchdowns, but I’m not surprised because he works so hard,” Whisenhunt said in a Wednesday conference call. “I think that being in a competition with Matt, where he had to earn this, made him a better player.”

Known as one of the good guys in the NFL — during their weekly family dinner, Warner and wife Brenda select one family in the restaurant and anonymously pay their tab, and the family also hosts at-risk or Make-a-Wish families at Disney World for a week during the offseason — Warner was a two-time NFL Most Valuable Player while with the Rams, but his storybook career seemed on the decline after he was benched as St. Louis’ starter in 2003.

The next year, he signed with the Giants, asked to hold the starting job while then-rookie Eli Manning learned the ropes. But Warner faltered, and Manning replaced him 10 games into the season.

Warner joined the Cardinals in 2005.

For the Iowa native, both phases of his NFL career have been special.

“The one difference, obviously, is the amount of success we had in St. Louis and coming in so quickly and having that success,” said Warner, who was NFL MVP and Super Bowl MVP in 1999, his first season as a starter. “It was pretty special because nobody gave me one bit of a chance to be able to even play at this level, and then to play at this level and to play the way we did and win the Super Bowl, it was a pretty amazing time.

“But what’s so special about this time is that I’ve been here [in Arizona] and I’ve been part of this organization for four years. I’ve really started to understand the culture of this organization, and you could feel it, you could understand in a lot of different areas why the team had lost for so long. To see the strides that we’ve made and to see us beginning to overcome that, that’s pretty special.”

He added that those outside the Cardinals’ organization likely don’t understand how much work it has been turning around the franchise that lost more games than any other team in the 1990s. Being part of that turnaround has been a rewarding experience for Warner.

Despite his success — the gaudy numbers, heavy hardware and championship ring — there is one game that gnaws at Warner: Super Bowl XXXVI, when the Rams lost to the Patriots.

“That’s still the one game that I probably think about more than any other, even the [Super Bowl] that I won,” he said. “It’s one of those things that doesn’t come around very often.”

smanza@projo.com