When you’ve lost four of five after the bye and your pass rush has gone quiet, you don’t light a candle — you call Jason Pierre-Paul.

The Tampa Bay Buccaneers are trying to jolt both their edge room and their sideline energy by bringing back one of the pillars of their Super Bowl run. JPP, who terrorized quarterbacks in pewter from 2018–21, is back in the building on a practice-squad deal and already sounding like he never left.

And according to him, this isn’t some nostalgia tour.

“I feel good,” Pierre-Paul told reporters Tuesday. “As far as the training, I’ve been doing a lot of training with my personal trainer, and he don’t stop. He trains everything. In football, you have to bring it. We kept it going, and he got me in the best shape of my entire career.”

That’s a bold claim for a 14-year vet who hasn’t played an NFL snap since 2023 and is coming off a three-sack season in 2022 with the Ravens. But the Bucs aren’t just betting on numbers — they’re betting on juice. This team badly needs someone who walks into the locker room and raises the thermostat.

Pierre-Paul returns to a mix of old and new faces in Tampa, and he’s leaning hard into the “family” vibe that made those 2020 and 2021 teams so dangerous.

“It’s all about family. I step in here, it feels like family,” he said. “Some guys, I don’t even know… but I’ll get to know them. You make the best of it. You try to know each and everybody on the team and try to connect with them someway, somehow.”

Right now, he’s on the practice squad, but nobody’s pretending this is a long-term stash. The expectation is clear: if his conditioning is as advertised, JPP will be in the edge rotation sooner rather than later, asked to give Tampa situational heat on passing downs and a veteran voice in a room that’s been too quiet.

The question, of course, is whether there’s any high-end ball left.

Pierre-Paul isn’t in a hurry to answer that.

“You gotta wait and see,” he said with a grin. “I could still have it, I might [not] have it, what you think? You just gotta wait and see.”

For a reeling Bucs team searching for a spark, that mystery — and that swagger — might be exactly the kind of gamble worth taking.