There is no more thrilling play in sports than a game-winning Hail Mary touchdown pass in football, a play so rare, random and revered that it seemingly requires the divine hand to be completed. One of the greatest examples came in December 2015, when quarterback Aaron Rodgers brought the Green Bay Packers back to beat the Detroit Lions after trailing 20-0 in the third quarter. He sealed the victory by scrambling to evade the rush and uncorking a 61-yard spiral. It looked, acclaimed sportswriter Ian O’Connor writes in his new biography, “Out of the Darkness: The Mystery of Aaron Rodgers,” “like he was trying to throw it over the top of the Empire State Building from a spot on Thirty-Fourth Street.” Tight end Richard Rodgers (no relation) leaped up and hauled it in for “The Miracle in Motown.” Incredibly, Rodgers completed two more Hail Marys within little more than a year’s time.

Rodgers isn’t that guy anymore, but the four-time MVP, now a member of the New York Jets, has returned for a 20th season. He has flashed a bit of the vintage magic, so maybe there’s hope for the hapless Jets and their 55-year Super Bowl drought just yet!

At the very least, a successful season for Rodgers at 40 years old would be a lot of fun, and could be restorative for all of us who loved watching his brilliantly accurate flick-of-the-wrist darts but have grown weary of his “woke establishment,” “nobody controls me” blather. It was much more enjoyable when Rodgers wasn’t emulating his hero Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as a tedious vaccination skeptic, and outdoing him as a proud destroyer of Bear carcasses.

Mercifully, O’Connor’s book isn’t centered around Rodgers’s conspiracy theories. That kind of thing is in there, but it’s a football story first, and besides, Rodgers’s galaxy-brained “takes” aren’t the central story of his life even away from the gridiron. He has been estranged from his immediate family (parents Darla and Ed, brothers Luke and Jordan) for going on a decade. It’s this sad core underlying the second half of his NFL glory years that makes him, if not a tragic figure, certainly a more sympathetic one.

“Out of the Darkness” is bookended by recent scenes of Rodgers and his family: a fleeting father and son embrace, each saying “I love you,” at a celebrity golf tournament in 2023 (“the first time they had spoken in nearly nine years,” O’Connor writes); and Rodgers’s ill-fated Jets debut that September, with his parents in the crowd (they have continued attending some of his games even while not speaking). On the fourth snap of the season, they watched in agony as their son went down with a season-ending tear of his Achilles’ tendon, with nothing they could do but sit in the stands and pray. O’Connor captures that dark night for the family, with the parents getting back to their Airbnb “around the same time their heartbroken son was trying to sleep off the worst night of his career three and a half miles away.”

Tolstoy’s edict about all unhappy families being unhappy in a different way holds true for the Rodgers clan, but the Russian master might have also said that each family’s way of ending up there can be ridiculous. Nobody in the entire saga, which O’Connor rigorously reports, comes out looking like an adult in the room. Various strands of the family’s dissolution, involving money, ego and Aaron’s lines in the sand, have included: passive-aggressively unopened Christmas gifts, cash-grab T-shirts featuring Rodgers’s helmeted likeness, “The Bachelorette” (his brother Jordan won Season 12), #rememberwhereyoucamefrom appended to one of his brother Luke’s Instagram posts, and evangelical tut-tutting about an MVP quarterback having relations outside of marriage (“Aaron’s mother disapproved of premarital sex and was opposed to her middle child sharing a hotel room with his girlfriend even as an NFL player”).

Rodgers’s religious un-awakening began in high school, when he wavered on the “saved and unsaved,” “us and them,” “heaven and hell” tenants of the church in which he was raised. O’Connor posits this time as the underpinning of Rodgers’s “question everything” ethos. Skepticism can be righteous, until it curdles into cynicism, and then rots into a belief system where nothing is what it seems in Mr. Rodgers’s Neighborhood.

To his credit, O’Connor streamlines how Rodgers morphed from a chill, charming California dude who delivered pinpoint throws like nobody else to a podcast guy playing footsie with 9/11 and Sandy Hook truthers. He breaks it up and serves the uncut Aaron in small doses, which can still be exhausting, despite examples of Rodgers’s behind-the-scenes decency and generosity. O’Connor offers multiple firsthand accounts of his subject’s charity, ranging from large donations to the Salvation Army and California wildfire relief to more personal stories, like the time he rigged his team’s white elephant Christmas exchange so that a practice-squad player could get a new Ford Bronco.

There’s a lot to root for in the Aaron Rodgers story, because nothing came easy. O’Connor delivers a clear sense of his evolution as a person as well as a passer. It’s a remarkable journey that includes his season in front of a few hundred fans at Butte College, a community college not far from his hometown of Chico, Calif.; bringing the moribund program at the University of California, Berkeley, to prominence; improbably free-falling from the potential No. 1 pick in the NFL draft to No. 24; suffering indignities as Brett Favre’s backup during Favre’s dithering-diva era; and winning Super Bowl XLV in 2011 with his family by his side as the confetti rained down.

O’Connor writes that Rodgers leading the Jets to the NFL mountaintop would “likely stand as the biggest story of my four decades covering sports in New York.” It would certainly go a long way to burnishing the quarterback’s football legacy, because as things stand, he owns a middling 11-10 playoff record as a starter, with just the one Super Bowl appearance. Not all his fault, of course, but he did have a lot of play-calling power in Green Bay and titles count the most on a resume, fair or not. It has to sting for him to watch Patrick Mahomes, a player who clearly modeled his game after Rodgers, usurp him on the Mount Rushmore of quarterbacks. By Rodgers’s own admission, his public persona has taken a hit, but that too can change in a New York minute. No Jets fans alive will care about whatever inane “truths” he has to tell, so long as he’s holding the Vince Lombardi Trophy aloft under the Broadway lights, his most reliable path out of the darkness.

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Patrick Sauer is a freelance writer and the co-host of “Squawkin’ Sports,” a live online talk show that features authors of books about sports.

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Out of the Darkness

The Mystery of Aaron Rodgers

By Ian O’Connor

Mariner. 355 pp. $29.99