The 49ers’ chaotic September showed this is Brock Purdy’s team

SANTA CLARA — The 49ers are going to be alright.

I think.

Don’t hold me to that.

That’s because while the Niners’ season might be four games old, if we’re being honest about the modern NFL, it’s also just getting started.

With the way NFL teams practice in the summer (if they practice at all) and their disdain for the exhibition schedule, September is, in effect, the preseason in this league. It’s a time to work things out; to find one’s identity.

And while the 49ers had an up-and-down “preseason” they are, at 2-2 after a 30-13 win over the Patriots on Sunday at Levi’s Stadium, doing just fine.

Nothing ideal. Nothing backbreaking.

Bastardizing a baseball axiom, you can’t win a division in September, but you can lose one.

And contrary to the doom-and-gloom following the Niners’ back-to-back losses in Weeks 2 and 3, there is plenty to celebrate with this team.

They found an identity, after all:

This is Brock Purdy’s team.

This is Fred Warner’s team.

It doesn’t take 25 years in the NFL to figure out that the quarterback and middle linebacker are important to team success — they’re the guys who wear the helmet speakers, after all. But four games in, the 49ers can argue they have the best quarterback-mike combo in the league.

That’s a development — an auspicious one — amid a season that has been defined, to date, by noise and nonsense.

Purdy not only looks like a franchise quarterback, but once again an MVP candidate. And he’s doing it without that other MVP candidate, Christian McCaffrey. He’s doing it without an elite defense (at least in Weeks 2 and 3). He’s doing it with an offensive line that seems hellbent on making him run for his life.

Conditions are hardly perfect, but Purdy has been pretty close to it, overall.

Purdy’s taken his game to a new level in 2023, with Sunday’s scrambling-and-deep-ball-throwing performance showing how dangerous he is to opposing defenses. No. 13 isn’t just some dude in Kyle Shanahan’s offense — he is the dude Shanahan has been waiting for since he arrived in the Bay.

“He has the confidence of when to hang in there and when to make the play work and when to break,” Shanahan said of Purdy’s Russell Wilson-like scrambling ability.

“[I] Love having that aspect [to] our offense.”

You also have Warner operating at a level far superior to anything — or anyone — I have ever seen. This is some Brian Urlacher, Ray Lewis-type stuff, only all the more impressive, because the role of the middle linebacker is so much more athletically challenging these days.

Warner is not only the best run-stopping linebacker in the game, slipping past blocks with stunning ease and delivering the kind of hits that make seasoned professionals question their line of work, but he’s also the best pass-coverage linebacker going, too.

His interception on Sunday, which gave the Niners an early 13-0 lead, was as impressive an individual defensive play as you will ever see: Warner read quarterback Jacoby Brissett like a kid’s book, abandoning his initial responsibility to go to where he knew Brissett would throw the ball.

Rising up like a video-game linebacker circa the early aughts (my fellow millennials know about this), Warner not only made an insane catch, but, despite landing on his tuchus, he was able to get up before being touched and run 45 yards into the end zone, stretching the ball over the goal line like he was George Kittle.

It all happened so fast that the otherworldliness of the play could have been overlooked. But let’s be clear: Linebackers aren’t supposed to be able to do stuff like that.

Especially not linebackers, who, the play before, delivered a hit so hard on Patriots running back Antonio Gibson, you could hear the pads crack in the press box, roughly a thousand feet above the field.

Warner is beyond appointment television. He’s the kind of player that requires you to be in the stadium to fully understand. The higher you are in the stands, the more you can comprehend how otherworldly this specter of a player is.