Mark Cannizzaro

Mark Cannizzaro

NFL

Ex-Jets star now in Bucs’ corner

TAMPA, Fla. — It didn’t look right yesterday. The number remains the same, but the color is off. Darrelle Revis’ uniform still has No. 24 printed on the front and back of it, but it doesn’t look right in red, white and pewter.

Revis was supposed to be a Jet for life, wearing No. 24 in green and white from Hofstra to Florham Park and possibly to Canton. He is one of those rare special players a team drafts and nurtures into a star who remains with that team for his entire career. His agents were pitching him as the Derek Jeter of New York football.

But that plan went off the rails in April, when the Jets traded Revis, arguably one of the top players in team history, to the Buccaneers for a couple of draft picks.

And now, because fate in sports sometimes works in such mysteriously magical ways, Revis is set to play against the Jets in Sunday’s season opener at MetLife Stadium — a showdown that has been widely anticipated since the moment the Jets’ new general manager, John Idzik, pulled the trigger on the controversial deal.

Based on the patented slapstick silliness surrounding the Jets this summer, highlighted by quarterback calamity and including Idzik being as reclusive as former team owner Leon Hess, it has become expected that Revis will produce at least one pick-six in the game to embarrass his former team.

Revis lies in wait for Jets rookie quarterback Geno Smith, who will start and make his NFL debut Sunday. Is there a Jets fan alive who does not believe Revis will do something to haunt the Jets?

So that pressure awaits Gang Green in four days.

But Revis is not without pressures of his own. He also will have his own demons to overcome. It will mark his first game action since last September, when he tore the ACL in his left knee in a Week 3 game against the Dolphins.

That Derek Jeter notion has taken a sudden turn, and the next stop is the Meadowlands as an opposing player. So much for being a “Jet for life.’’

“That’s what they told me; let’s get back to the real facts,’’ Revis told The Post yesterday, sounding still hurt from what he believes was false promise. “That’s what they told me: ‘Jet for life.’ This came out of their mouths. So when you hear something like that from management you believe it. You believe they have your back, and you have their back. But I guess that wasn’t the case.’’

Revis said when he sought answers from Ryan and Idzik this offseason, “everybody disappeared,’’ and he sounded still disillusioned by it after putting in six years and making it to four Pro Bowls in Jets green and white.

Revis, surely recognizing he could be in danger of getting himself too amped up Sunday, insisted: “I’m just approaching it like just a regular week. … I had to move on, and that’s what I did. The New York Jets moved on without me, I’ve got to move on without them.

“Players have been traded or moved from teams for years,’’ Revis said. “That’s how you have to look at it.’’

Ryan, sounding a bit forlorn without his best player yesterday, called Revis a “rare’’ athlete, adding, “A guy like him comes around once every 15 or 20 years, if that. He really is a special player. Obviously Darrelle was the premier corner in football.’’

Former Jets GM Mike Tannenbaum, the man who drafted Revis, said he has little doubt the Revis who shows up Sunday at MetLife will still be the premier corner in football.

“If you cut Darrelle Revis in half, what you would find is an all-time, all-world competitor,’’ Tannenbaum told The Post yesterday. “He’s going to come back, and I’m sure he’s going to be a great player [again]. He’ll do whatever it takes to get that done.’’