INDIANAPOLIS – Someday his face will be on football’s Mount Rushmore, the Hoodie taking its place alongside the Grin (Lombardi), the Jaw (Shula), the Jaw II (Noll), the Sweater (Bill Walsh) and the Fedora (Landry). And when it does, art will fuse with life.

The Great Stone Face will finally be, well, the Great Stone Face.

This is a joke at Bill Belichick’s expense, but it’s OK because, one, Belichick couldn’t care less how many jokes you make at his expense, and, two, humor is a room he allegedly never enters. He is a hard man, the narrative goes, a pitiless robot hollowed out and filled up again with X’s and O’s and a remorseless gray work ethic that numbs the souls of everyone who plays for him.

And then Bill Belichick came to Indianapolis this week, and someone asked about Hoosier hospitality.

“I never had too much hospitality here until I went for it on fourth-and-2 (against the Colts in a 35-34 loss in 2009),” Belichick replied. “Since then, I’ve been greeted in a lot more friendly manner than I have in the past.”

OK, so it wasn’t much of a joke. But it was enough of one to bring all these preconceptions to a screeching halt.

Belichick is a funny guy. No, really.

“He’s very funny, and you never know when it’s going to happen,” Patriots lineman Logan Mankins said this week.

“He’s a good dude. You just have to catch him on the right day,” concurred tight end Aaron Hernandez.

Of course, he is all those other things, too, which is why he brings the Patriots to a fifth Super Bowl in 11 years this weekend. If he has an impish streak – going for it on fourth down in the shadow of his own goal, say, or having Tom Brady quick kick just to mess with an opponent – the secret to Belichick, his players all say, is his consistency.

“He’s the same every day,” Mankins says. “He’s not going to be one way one day and be somebody else the next.”

Tom Brady, the player with whom Belichick will always be twinned, agrees.

“I’d say that he coaches me the same way that he coached me the day that I got here,” Brady says. “On our team, there really is no separate treatment for different players. The rookies are expected to perform and act the same as the veteran guys. He’s very tough; he says to us from time to time that it’s a demanding place to play and really not meant for everyone.”

Which is to say: There is a Patriot Way and there is Your Way, pal, and you either buy into the former or you’re sent on the latter. Randy Moss bought into it, and flourished; Albert Haynesworth did not. And if the flamboyant Chad Ochicinco failed to grasp the X’s and O’s of it, he, too, bought into the culture.

Consider how he replied when asked whether it would be hard on him if he didn’t play in the Super Bowl.

“Why would it be hard?” he said. “When you’re part of a team, I mean, there’s nothing hard about it at all.”

That’s a mindset Belichick learned first at the knee of his father, Steve, a coach at the Naval Academy when Belichick was growing up, and later in the coaching incubator created by Bill Parcells. If anyone was bred to be a coach, it was Belichick; it’s why, as awed as he is to be going after a record-tying fourth Super Bowl victory, he counts it as no more fulfilling than coaching special teams for Ray Perkins in the early ’80s or breaking down film for Ted Marchibroda in the ’70s.

“To me, I learn something every day, a lot of things. It is a constant process,” Belichick said this week. “Wherever I was, I was consumed. I really just try to live in the moment, wherever that is. Right now, it’s here, and I’m happy to be here, believe me.”

bensmith@jg.net