Not this exact moment, on a Tuesday evening in June, when she's sitting in a conference room adjacent to her office at the Indiana Farm Bureau Football Center. But the moment that officially happened earlier that week, when the Colts announced their franchise ownership transition from late Owner & CEO Jim Irsay to his three daughters, Irsay-Gordon, Casey Foyt and Kalen Jackson.

Irsay-Gordon, in the present moment, is having a conversation about the Colts, the NFL franchise for which she is now the principal owner.

But we're also having a conversation about Greek mythology, and the Ship of Theseus.

"The whole story is it's a ship that over the years, the wood gets replaced," Irsay-Gordon explains.

Eventually, every single plank of wood from the original ship has been replaced.

"And then," Irsay-Gordon continues, "is it still the same boat?"

Jim Irsay was the plank – the biggest, sturdiest, staunchest plank – in the Colts' ship. He was there for 54 years as the heart and soul of the franchise, from his time as a ballboy with Johnny Unitas to a historic overnight move from Baltimore to Indianapolis to proudly hoisting a Lombardi Trophy next to Peyton Manning on a rainy February night in Miami.

Replacing Irsay's plank is no small undertaking. But Irsay-Gordon, along Foyt and Jackson, has a vision for the ship she and her sisters are now captaining without their father's presence.

"We talk about it all the time," Irsay-Gordon says in reference to the Ship of Theseus. "And I think in a way, a football team is like that."

The goal for Irsay-Gordon is to keep the Colts' ship the same, even as the planks that keep it afloat are changed. This happens in every NFL franchise. It just so happened there had been a consistent piece of the ship for over a half-century.

And, back to the conference room on 56th Street, Irsay-Gordon is explaining the vision for how the soul of the Colts will continue on, both on the field and in the community of Indianapolis, even as those metaphorical wood planks are replaced.

That's the moment she's spent years thinking about and preparing for. The moment when her vision for the franchise will guide the direction of her family's business – the ship, if you will.

Broadly, the vision is to be the best.

That's easy to say.

But Irsay-Gordon has a lot more to say about it.

"I know it could be misunderstood to say, I don't like talking just about winning. I like talking about being the best," Irsay-Gordon says. "... I feel like to say 'win' is just more outcome-oriented, right? It's more outcome-oriented, more short-term. To me, it's about being the best."

"When you talk football with her, she gets it. She understands it."

As we're discussing the fine line NFL owners have to toe between discipline and adaptability, Irsay-Gordon brings up another story. This one, comparatively, is a little more recent than the Ship of Theseus.

Late in 1911, two explorers set out in an attempt to become the first human to reach the South Pole: Roald Amundsen, a Norwegian, and Robert Falcon Scott, a Brit. Each had a team, but they took different routes and had different strategies.

The Scott team, Irsay-Gordon explains, had a budget six times larger than Amundsen's. He had more technology. And he kept on pushing and pushing in an attempt to reach the South Pole first – hey, let's go a few extra miles today, stuff like that.

Amundsen, meanwhile, stuck to a deeply-researched process.

"Even when the weather was good and there was a temptation, let's just go 15 more miles today," Irsay-Gordon says, "They said, nope, this is how we mapped it out. Versus the other guy — he had no discipline and he was just some lord from Britain gave me all this money to be able to say we got here first."

Scott was one of five members of his team to die on the expedition. Amundsen reached the South Pole first, and his entire team made it back from Antarctica alive.

"He stayed disciplined to his plan," Irsay-Gordon says.

You might read that as an allegory to how spending on an NFL roster does not always equal success. That wasn't the context with which Irsay-Gordon brought up Amundsen and Scott – and, earlier in our conversation, she did make it clear that the Colts won't have to choose between drafting/developing and free agency.

"It's not an either/or," Irsay-Gordon says. "We have to do both."

No, this is more about staying disciplined amid the NFL's hyper-focused urgency to win. There have been teams that, so to speak, arrived early – they won a division or had success sooner into a process than expected. Sometimes those teams stay disciplined to their plan. One recent example I, personally, think about here: The Buffalo Bills, in 2017, made the playoffs in the first year of Brandon Beane's tenure as general manager. Instead of pushing all their chips in on that version of their roster, Beane maneuvered around the draft to select quarterback Josh Allen in the top 10; the Bills cratered in 2018, but began a sustainable run of success a year later in 2019.

Other teams have a plan, and the moment it fails, they blow it up. Knowing what's a speed bump and what's a roadblock is an important skill for an ownership group to possess.

"You can't be so rigid," Irsay-Gordon says. "You have to make a compromise, but then you also have to be able to be disciplined."

Amundsen's journey to the South Pole wasn't all smooth and didn't all go according to plan. He fell behind early, too, with the Scott team pushing beyond their limits for more miles per day. But he adapted instead of panicking – and, for some context, there was plenty of urgency for him to win the race against Scott, with national pride and personal glory on the line.

"Players and coaches (have the most) urgency in the short term," Irsay-Gordon says. "And then personnel and your GM are kind of in the middle. And then for us as owners, we just — our horizon is so long."

In football terms, Irsay-Gordon pointed to some recent examples of players not becoming fully-formed versions of themselves until three or four years into their career. She mentions Grover Stewart, a 2017 fourth-round pick who became a starter in Year 3 of his career and is now among the NFL's top smothering run defenders; she also brings up Nick Cross, the 2022 third-round pick who started the first two games of his career, got benched for nearly two years, then re-emerged as a rock-solid starting safety in 2024.

And that brings us to Anthony Richardson, the 2023 No. 4 overall pick who in training camp will have to compete to hang on to his starting job.

"Where he is in his career and in his deal as a rookie, we still have time," Irsay-Gordon says. "He still has time to prove it."

Having said that, Irsay-Gordon continues: "Bring a sense of urgency. And nothing brings a sense of urgency more than competition."

Irsay-Gordon, though, can not only speak authoritatively on her vision for the Colts and the process it'll take for it to come to life. She can speak authoritatively on football, just like her father could, whether it's about the starting quarterback or the developmental trajectory of a defensive tackle or safety.

"When you talk football with her," head coach Shane Steichen said a few weeks ago, "she gets it. She understands it."

"What do you do when you're down there?"

Irsay-Gordon, over the years, has fielded plenty versions of that question from her peers at the NFL ownership level. She's been a weekly presence on the Colts' sidelines, donning a coaching headset, jotting notes on a play call sheet and taking in her team's games from a perspective rarely seen by other professional sports owners.

"I was telling them some of these stories," Irsay-Gordon says, "and they were like, maybe I should do that for a game or two."

Whether other owners could pull off what Irsay-Gordon has, though, is a separate question. Once coaches – and she's been on the sidelines since the Chuck Pagano era – understand what she's about, and why she's there, they get it. She's there out of curiosity and a willingness to learn, not because she wants to insert herself into coaching decisions or strategies.

"That's why I started doing it, because it's like a black box," Irsay-Gordon says. "Nobody could tell me what they did."

Irsay-Gordon brought up an example of a former Colts coach who'd been "burned a lot in years past" with other organizations. He was a little hesitant about her presence deep into the heavily-protected informational vault of a football team. But as time went on, the coach softened his stance.

"I think once he started realizing I just genuinely want to learn and I want to understand," Irsay-Gordon says, "he actually started realizing that I could help them."

Help, in these cases, doesn't look like berating coaches about their decision-making or personnel choices, or questioning play calls with a combative agenda.

And asking questions to understand, not criticize, has allowed Irsay-Gordon to fill her brain with more in-depth knowledge of football than, let's call it, at least 99 percent of the population possesses.

"Training to be a psychologist may have helped me," Irsay-Gordon, who joined the Colts in 2008 while completing coursework toward a doctoral degree in clinical psychology, said.

Irsay-Gordon acknowledges that she doesn't think she can be on the sidelines or in team meeting rooms forever. But think of the knowledge she's gained through those experiences.

She's seen the preparation and process that go into how coaches make split-second, game-defining decisions. She's observed the interpersonal dynamics of position meeting rooms. She's learned a ton about football, just like her dad did when he was named the Colts' general manager in 1984.

For over a decade, Irsay-Gordon waded into uncomfortable waters; she emerges as a team owner armed with perspectives – but also restraint – that will help keep her vision for the Colts on track.

Again, owners need to know when their franchise is hitting a speed bump or a road block.

Sometimes, it's like driving a car at night. Irsay-Gordon, through the knowledge she's gained, certainly has the headlights on.

"If you're not striving — it's like when you set goals," Irsay-Gordon says. "You want to set a goal, that if they were all safe and really easy, then it's as if you're not growing, right? Your life would be kind of boring and maybe be safe. It'd be – what'd you do? Oh, I stayed safe and survived. But it's like, who wants to just survive and just exist? Don't you want to thrive and live?"

Irsay-Gordon, over the last month, has had to balance grieving the loss of her father with the weight of the transition she, Foyt and Jackson had, for years, prepared to undertake.

The human aspect of it is she and her sisters lost a parent. The professional aspect is they lost the leader of their business.

"I think all of us, in our own way, are going to have to adjust to that too," Irsay-Gordon says. "That's gonna take time. But he set up and planned for us so we could continue this legacy, and that part's really amazing."

Irsay-Gordon, Foyt and Jackson will have to navigate how to be both sisters and business partners in the Colts' arrangement. All three hold Owner titles; Irsay-Gordon is also CEO, Foyt is also Executive Vice President and Jackson is also Chief Brand Officer & President of the Indianapolis Colts Foundation. Major organizational decisions will be made with all three having a voice; on a day-to-day basis, each brings their own strengths and viewpoints to leading the franchise.

"We have each other to kind of lean on for (decisions), which I think is a positive thing," Irsay-Gordon says. "We have to have good governance and an order of that," Irsay-Gordon says. "But I think as long as we stay aligned and we continue to communicate with each other and are willing to be honest with each other — it's true, we all have our own niche and our own area, our own strengths and weaknesses."

There's a main point here. The alignment between Irsay-Gordon, Foyt and Jackson is rooted in this: The same foundational goal of keeping the Colts in the Irsay family, and doing what's best for the Colts with every decision that needs to be made at an ownership level.

"That aligns us in a powerful way," Irsay-Gordon says.

So the biggest, sturdiest plank in the Colts ship has been replaced. Jim Irsay's vision, his counsel, his unique-for-an-owner football acumen is no longer keeping the ship together.

It's now up to Irsay-Gordon, Foyt and Jackson to answer that Greek philosophical problem: If all the planks are replaced, is it still the same ship?

"That is the vision and mission," Irsay-Gordon says. "As long as we stay true to the core of what's in our soul, it can be."