In his first public interview since the Super Bowl, New England quarterback Tom Brady comments on a variety of subjects.

The Providence Journal / Bob Breidenbach

In his first public interview since the Super Bowl, Tom Brady had praise for the New York Giants, joking contempt for the New York Jets, and expressed hope that yesterday’s meeting between NFL commissioner Roger Goodell and former Patriots video assistant Matt Walsh would finally put an end to Spygate.

“It was really a great game,” Brady — speaking during a 35-minute interview on The Big Show on Sports Radio 850 WEEI Radio — said of New England’s 17-14 loss to the Giants in Super Bowl XLII. “I wish we would’ve played better at certain times, but [the Giants] made the plays and they deserved it.

“And I have a lot of respect for that team because they work hard, and they have a lot of great leaders on that team. It’s kind of a blue-collar team. When you do lose a game, you at least want to lose to guys you respect. And I certainly respect those guys. I don’t respect everybody, but I do respect the Giants.”

When asked who he didn’t respect, Brady said simply, “There’s four letters in their name.” When host Glenn Ordway asked, “Those green guys?” Brady laughed and responded, “Yeah, exactly.”

The Jets, of course, have four letters in their name and wear green.

Spygate was also a topic of conversation.

“It wasn’t the right thing to do,” Brady said of coach Bill Belichick’s practice of taping opposing teams’ coaching signals. “We paid the price [a $500,000 fine for Belichick, and a $250,000 fine for the organization, and the loss of a first-round draft pick]. We accepted it. And we moved on.

“And that’s what life’s about. In life, you’re accountable for your decisions, for all your actions, and once you take responsibility, and you accept the punishment, you move on.”

He hopes that everyone else will be moving on, as well.

“We dealt with it all season,” he said. “We dealt with it now, until today, throughout the offseason …We put it behind us the following week when we went out to play San Diego [in Week Two] after the Jet game [which is when the Pats were caught taping signals]. So I think it’s just … it was an incident that we accepted and we paid the price for, and a very heavy price at that, and we moved forward. So I hope everybody else does, too.”

But he also says he understands why the incident took such a heavy toll on their reputation.

“Because our coach isn’t the type of person that wants to go out and talk about his game plans and talk about injuries and talk about how to beat teams, I think people don’t like that,” he said.

“For us, in terms of us winning games, that’s what’s the best thing … but obviously, for our fans and for the media, it’s not the best thing for them. They want to know all the information right away and coach Belichick says, ‘Wait a minute, I want the other teams to have to figure these things out.’ Which we love as a team. We love, as players, that our coach doesn’t want to go out and toot his own horn and talk about how great of a coach he is. He just wants to win.”

Brady later added: “I think, in this particular instance, people kind of want to chop us down a little bit. I understand that, too, and that’s part of the competition. [But] it didn’t mean anything. We won 18 games this last year.”

While Spygate may have been a big issue with fans and the media, he said it wasn’t with opposing players.

“Nobody really said much,” he said. “Actually, it was funny. I got an e-mail from [former teammate] Lawyer Milloy [who played against the Pats as a member of the Bills from 2003-05] and he said, ‘Ha, you guys cheated when you played us. Therefore, we beat you guys.’ And I said, ‘OK, you’re right. We give you four touchdowns back. Oh, [shoot], we still win.’ ”

The Pats were 5-1 against Milloy’s Bills in those years, winning games by scores of 31-0, 31-17, 29-6, 21-16 and 35-7.

“[Milloy] laughed. He laughed,” Brady continued. “Believe me, none of the players think anything of it. Believe me. Not one person has expressed anything to me. It’s a dead issue. It’s a complete dead issue. It’s been that way for a long time.”

In addition to the distraction of Spygate, the Pats were also trying to become the second team in history to finish the season unbeaten in 2007. But Brady says the Pats took all that in stride.

“As a team, we really insulated ourselves from it,” he said. “I think the great strength of ours is [Belichick] keeps us focused on each game, each week and each day of practice. And if we didn’t have a good day of practice, we heard about it. So we never got caught up in it.

“When we started last season, the goal wasn’t to go undefeated. It was to win the Super Bowl. And that will be the goal this year.”

It was a goal that went unfulfilled last year.

“It was numbing,” he said of the Super Bowl loss.

He particularly remembers plays he felt the Pats should have made.

“Just before [halftime], on the strip sack, Randy [Moss] was behind the defense,” he recalled, “but we just weren’t able to find him in time. That should have been a touchdown.”

Instead, the Giants hit him as we was about to release the ball and forced a fumble.

And in the game’s final seconds, he thought he’d connected on a bomb to Moss that was broken up by Giants cornerback Corey Webster.

“Aw, man, when I let that go, I thought we had it,” he said. “I thought that was it.”

But he adds the defeat wasn’t paralyzing, because he doesn’t think the Pats were caught underestimating the Giants.

“There was no way that we did that,” he said. “It wasn’t like we left anything on the table. … [The Giants had] a great defense … and one of the best defensive lines in football. We finally scored there at the end and they just had a miraculous drive at the end to score on our defense.”

It reminded him of the Pats’ first Super Bowl win, over the Rams.

“There was no way we should have won that game in 2001, but we found a way to win because we executed,” he said. “And I think the Giants executed that way against us this year.

“[The loss] will stay with us for a long time, obviously, but hopefully we can have more opportunities. And I’m confident that we will. As long as we have [owner Robert Kraft] and [Belichick], I’m confident that we will.”

amartone@projo.com