The Showcase Cinema De Lux at Patriot Place opened for a media preview last month.

The Providence Journal / Sandor Bodo

FOXBORO — This is not your father’s Foxboro.

Not anymore.

Remember when a trip to see the Patriots play was like a trip into football’s past, when the surroundings seemed as gritty as the game itself, as blue-collar as the crowd, all about blocks and tackles in the dirt, as if it could have been taken place in some old frozen tundra pit of some old newsreel from the ’50s, the NFL of romance?

Remember when the old stadium used to sit alongside Route 1 like some mistake, a stadium with all the glamour of a tractor pull, full of concrete and pavement and big parking lots?

No more.

Welcome to Patriot Place, this new showcase that now surrounds the glitzy Gillette Stadium like a promise of the future.

So where to begin?

Is it with the glitzy new CBS Scene, billed as a themed restaurant and nightclub, “the first of its kind?” Is it with the new cinema complex that’s supposed to be about the movie experience of the future? Is it with the assortment of new upscale shops and boutiques? Or is it with enough restaurants to feed a small army, never mind a football team?

Or is it with the new Hall at Patriot Place, an interactive experience that will not only house the New England Patriots Hall of Fame, but will also serve as a showcase for the rich history of the Patriots?

It’s all there.

All part of what is being called a “super regional lifestyle and entertainment center.”

And you thought it was only about football.

No more.

“When I first started here it was just Foxboro Stadium and some dirt,” said Bryan Morry, who grew up in Warwick and until last December was a co-host of the afternoon show on AM 790 The Score with Scott Cordishi.

Before that, though, Morry had worked for Patriots Football Weekly, an in-house paper that covered the team. He had started back in the late ’90s, back in the old stadium, and then in the old racetrack building and later at an office park in nearby Walpole, because everything at the old stadium was cramped, a remnant from another era.

Now his official title is the executive director of the Hall at Patriot Place, and he’s had a bird’s-eye view of the project that’s transformed both Route 1 and this town.

“I stand in awe of what the Krafts have done here,” he said

Morry was giving me a tour Thursday, and there’s no question it was all a bit overwhelming, especially if you remember the old stadium and what used to be there, back when if there was a worse stadium in the NFL, it must have been hiding. Back when the stadium just seemed to have plopped in the middle of nowhere, no ambience, no real place to go before or afterward, just a game and then a traffic jam.

The first signs of the new digs were there last year, a strip of big stores along the southern end of the property, the centerpiece being the first Bass Pro Shops in the area. That was the opening salvo in the Kraft’s attempt to make this little stretch of Foxboro a destination center, which only make sense if you think abut it. Or why own a big piece of property and use it only for football and soccer games?

But, as big and splashy as the new stores were last year, they didn’t dominate the landscape. Patriot Place does. It changes the look. It changes the experience. It changes everything.

We began walking through the outdoors mall, which is Patriot Place, past a Mexican grill, and a game shop, and a boutique, restaurants such as Davio’s and Red Robin, and more stores, and the site where the new four-star hotel is going up, and another one where the new outpatient clinic in partnership with Mass General and Brigham and Women’s hospitals.

“Oh, yeah,” said Morry. “We also got this little stadium.”

The stadium.

The one that houses the glamour team in the NFL, the one that’s won three Super Bowls in seven years, the reason why Gillette Stadium has become our newest sacred ground.

The one that has dramatically changed the way this franchise is regarded.

If you walk through the outdoor mall that is the new Patriot Place, which is up the hill from Gillette Stadium, the new stadium seems almost in scale. And in between Patriot Place and Gillette is the new Hall of Fame.

It’s scheduled to open in two weeks, and it does two things: at the most obvious level, it honors the Patriots’ past, an important thing for any franchise.

It is what the Red Sox have been so good at through the years, their reverence for the great players of the past, the sense that it’s all one big continuum, one big season that goes round and round. It’s what the new ownership group has done with Fenway Park, making it an event, promoting it, fathers passing down the history to their children, making going to Fenway as much a part of the Boston experience as the Freedom Trail. A place where the Patriots’ great players will live forever, right there with peoples’ memories of them.

It also will be a destination spot, not just a place to go on game days. Compete with constant videos and interactive displays.

All part of the Krafts’ grand plan.

One that’s all about the future, and so very far from how things used to be here, back when this stretch along Route 1 was about a stadium and a lot of dirt.

One that is not your father’s Foxboro anymore.

breynold@projo.com