That’s where the star quarterback always held his weekly news conferences, a spot we often would hear him provide thoughtful answers on his teammates, great insight into how he approached the game and intelligent views on big-picture topics. Rodgers’ smartest-guy-in-the-room vibe was on display more than ever as he neared the end of his 18-season run with the franchise, but love him or hate him, one thing you never could say about Rodgers was that he was dull.

In fact, I mostly found him to be riveting.

That’s the same impression Ian O’Connor got from afar while living on the East Coast. O’Connor is a giant in my business, a highly respected sports columnist who also authored four New York Times best-selling books.

He had a deal in place to write a book on LeBron James, but O’Connor soured on that idea when another author beat him to it. No problem, because O’Connor had a new subject in mind: Aaron Rodgers was coming to New York after being traded from the Packers.

“He might be the most polarizing athlete in American sports right now,” O’Connor said during a phone interview late last week. “He’s mysterious and fascinating and intriguing.”

Which is why O’Connor began a project that took him 15 months to complete. His sixth book, “Out of the Darkness: The Mystery of Aaron Rodgers,” came out on Tuesday and features exhaustive reporting on Rodgers’ life on and off the field.

This is an unauthorized biography, meaning Rodgers didn’t give his permission to O’Connor or provide input on how it would be constructed. But Rodgers was a participant to some degree, answering questions for nearly two hours at his Malibu home last February after O’Connor flew across the country without knowing how much access he’d be granted.

O’Connor already had sent in a manuscript to his publisher at that point, but he was willing to perform a rewrite after getting Rodgers to speak on the record about some key topics.

“He definitely made it a better book,” O’Connor said.

O’Connor was met with plenty of resistance along the way, mainly from friends and associates of Rodgers who were suspicious and perhaps assumed this was an attempt at a hit job. But unlike the biography O’Connor did on former New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick, who wouldn’t agree to be interviewed for the book and, according to O’Connor, encouraged others not to speak as well, Rodgers apparently didn’t put up any road blocks.

When Rodgers finally agreed to an interview, O’Connor had to pick and choose his spots because he had no idea if and when Rodgers would pull the plug on the session. There were topics that O’Connor felt he absolutely needed Rodgers to weigh in on, if for nothing else than out of fairness to him.

One such topic was Rodgers’ controversial stance on the COVID-19 pandemic and how he handled a question about his vaccination status leading into his second-to-last season in Titletown. Rodgers famously said he was “immunized,” leading those in the room — and anyone following the story elsewhere — to conclude that Rodgers had received the vaccine and was compliant with NFL protocol.

As it turned out, he was not. O’Connor wrote in his book that Rodgers expressed “one significant regret” over how he handled that late-summer news conference in Green Bay, admitting he should have been up front and told the truth about what he says is an allergy to the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines and fears about the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.

“If there’s one thing I wish could have gone different, it’s that, because that’s the only thing they could hit me with,” Rodgers, who tested positive for COVID-19 during the 2021 season and had to sit out a game against the Kansas City Chiefs, told O’Connor for the book. “And the reason I said (that I was immunized) is because that was the crux of my appeal. That statement was the crux of my appeal (to the NFL) — that I’ve been immunized.

“I had an immunization card from my holistic doctor, which looked similar. I wasn’t trying to pawn it off as a vaccine card, but I said, ‘Listen, here’s my protocol. Here’s what you can follow to look this up.’ And it was an ongoing appeal. So, if I had just said that in the moment, there’s no chance that the appeal would have been handled the exact same way.”

Another touchy subject O’Connor covered at length in the book is the fractures within Rodgers’ family. O’Connor interviewed Rodgers’ parents, Ed and Darla, about their estrangement from their son and, while Rodgers left some things unsaid about what led to the falling-out, he did provide to O’Connor his version of some aspects of the story.

That was, according to O’Connor, his least favorite chapter to write. But he balanced the family drama with a story that was much more inspiring.

O’Connor leads off the book with a chapter on Edward Rodgers, a B-24 pilot who flew 43 successful combat missions in World War II. The author introduced details that even Aaron Rodgers hadn’t heard about his grandfather.

“I really had no negative feelings going into it,” O’Connor said of the 326-page book on Rodgers. “No agenda whatsoever, other than to tell the truth about his career and life.”

Packers fans no doubt will be interested in O’Connor’s reporting on Rodgers’ divorce from the team that drafted him in the first round of the 2005 NFL Draft as Brett Favre’s replacement. O’Connor spoke with Mike McCarthy and wrote about Rodgers’ complicated relationship with him and the four-time MVP’s final coach in Green Bay, Matt LaFleur.

By the end of the 2022 season, the Packers were ready to move on to Rodgers’ hand-picked successor, Jordan Love. Rodgers, meanwhile, wasn’t ready to give up his quest for a second Super Bowl ring and found a match in the strangest of places.

“I think he saw an unbelievable opportunity in the Big Apple with a Charlie Brown franchise that hasn’t appeared in a Super Bowl since January of 1969,” said O’Connor, who worked at ESPN, The New York Post, USA Today and The New York Daily News and was named the No. 1 columnist in the country three times by judges in the Associated Press Sports Editors annual contest. “And I actually agree with him. I think it’s a great opportunity for him.

“If he wins a ring in New York for a franchise that has not been in the Super Bowl since Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon, that is going to feel like he won four rings and it’s going to do so many wonderful things for his legacy and historical standing in the sport.”

O’Connor, a master storyteller, acknowledged that only one thing could make that tale even better: The Jets having to go through Love and the Packers to win a championship in February.

“Could you imagine?” O’Connor said.