Green Bay Packers wide receiver Sterling Sharpe celebrates a touchdown against the Dallas Cowboys in Irving, Texas, on Nov. 24, 1994. (AP file photo)

Shannon Sharpe donned his gold jacket emblazoned with the Pro Football Hall of Fame logo at his Atlanta home last winter and awaited his brother’s arrival.

Sterling ambled down the stairs and into the basement looking perplexed.

“Welcome, bro!” Shannon said.

To what, Sterling wondered, “your house?”

“To the Pro Football Hall of Fame,” corrected Shannon. “Class of 2025.”

The first pair of brothers who will ever have both of their busts on display in Canton fell into each other’s arms, decades of doubts dissipating in a medley of laughter and tears.

Dashed was the notion that seven stellar NFL seasons weren’t enough for football immortality.

All along, the brothers figured it was Sterling who would reach Canton first. He was born three years earlier and the wide receiver had a standout career at South Carolina and then for the Green Bay Packers, who made him a first-round pick in 1988, two years before the Denver Broncos selected his younger brother in the seventh round out of Savannah State.

Sterling would start every game for seven straight seasons until a neck injury cut short his career just as he and the Packers were peaking. The green and gold would go on to return the title to Titletown behind fellow Hall of Famers Ron Wolf, LeRoy Butler, Reggie White and Brett Favre while Sterling dabbled in broadcasting before leaving football behind for the golf links.

Sterling was named to five Pro Bowls and earned first-team All-Pro honors the three years he led the league in receptions. He averaged 85 catches in his career — an unheard of number for that era and 10 more than Jerry Rice averaged in his first seven seasons.

In his last season he led the league with 18 touchdown receptions, including a trio of scores in his final game despite dealing with numbness in his arms and tingling in his neck caused by an abnormal loosening of the first and second vertebrae in his cervical spine.

He had felt increasingly bothersome symptoms over the last half of that season and he suffered what’s commonly referred to as “stingers” against the Falcons in the Packers’ final game at the old Milwaukee County Stadium on Dec. 18, 1994, and again six days later at Tampa, where he caught nine passes for 132 yards and three first-half touchdowns in what turned out to be his final game.

Right after Christmas, he learned he needed neck fusion surgery that would limit his head swivel, making it too dangerous to continue playing football. Upon hearing the prognosis, he stood up and shook his doctors’ hands.

“I had already accomplished what I wanted to,” Sterling told NBC affiliate WIS News in Columbia, South Carolina, this spring. “… I just wanted to play, and I got to play in the NFL for seven years.”

His career cut short at age 29, his protracted wait for Canton would last 31 years.

“Sterling was supposed to be in the Hall first,” Shannon said ahead of his 2011 induction, where he drew a standing ovation for saying, “I’m the second-best player in my own family.”

Unlike Sterling’s truncated testimonial, Shannon’s Canton credentials were never in question. He set the standard at tight end, going to eight Pro Bowls in 14 seasons, earning four first-team All-Pro honors and winning three Super Bowls in a four-year span, two in Denver and one in Baltimore.

He gave his first Super Bowl ring — from Denver’s 31-24 win over Green Bay in 1997 — to Sterling. And he called the chance to welcome his big brother into the Hall “the proudest moment of my life.”

Despite their shared love of the game, the brothers who grew up in a tiny cinder block house in rural Georgia were different in one big way: Shannon overcame a childhood speech impediment to become one of the game’s most talkative players and later one of football’s most vocal commentators. Sterling preferred to hone his craft in relative obscurity and mostly avoided the public and the media.

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