Let’s not bury the lead. So we won’t.

Bill Belichick should retire. Not just for a season or two, but for good.

There, I said it. It’s not anything that I ever thought I’d say, but it needs to be said, and perhaps, particularly so as we head to the Super Bowl, a game that Belichick pretty much owned for two decades. The former Browns head coach needs to get out while he will still be remembered as Bill Belichick should, as arguably the greatest head coach in pro football history and not just as a shadow of himself.

He is beveling on that now after a series of forgettable seasons with the New England Patriots that looked worse than the records, and those looked pretty bad.

It’s OK if he quits. The game — the young guys — always catches up to every coach and player. It just does.

When Belichick came to the Browns in 1991, I was shocked at how far ahead he was of the rest of the field with the way he looked at the game, thought about the game and coached the game. He was practically lapping the coaches at the end of the fraternity.

Paul Brown and all the other great ones were like that, too, when they started. By the time they exited, though, some of them not by their own volition, they were, at best, struggling to catch up. That is Belichick now. And the longer he would stay, the worse it would get.

I know he wants to stick around and break the career coaching wins record of former Browns defensive back Don Shula — it means a lot to him, because he and the Painesville Harvey High School and John Carroll University product didn’t like each other — but it wouldn’t be worth it for Belichick because he would have to stay way too long to do it.

He’s already done enough. He should just rest his case. It’s a rock-solid one.

Steve King