An old friend returns to Foxboro (updated).

[Mark Farinella]

The Patriots have released this photograph of what the players will see when they arrive at Gillette Stadium early Wednesday morning. All of the players have been issued new white helmets with the Pat Patriot logo on them, the symbol of the team from 1961-1992 that was originally created by sports cartoonist Phil Bissell.

The offensive players also have red practice jerseys instead of white. That's different from the old days, when the offensive players wore white and the defense red in practice, before Bill Parcells and then-owner James Busch Orthwein changed the primary color to blue to reflect the top-to-bottom change in the organization in 1993.

Defensive players will wear white practice shirts. Also, it's interesting that the practice shirts still have the small "Gillette" ad on them -- no fans can attend practices in the regular season, so to whom are they selling the razor blades? And the shirts also still have the "Flying Elvis" logo on the sleeves. I didn't see any evidence of non-contact jerseys (presume those would be blue to distinguish them from others), but one thing i did see was that not every player had a new helmet. Ex-Giant TE Michael Matthews didn't have a white helmet yet; must be getting one to his own specs.

The Patriots will wear their red throwback uniforms for Monday night's game against the Bills at Gillette Stadium, the first of four "AFL Legacy Games" the NFL is staging as part of the 50th anniversary celebration of the founding of the American Football League in 1960.

The throwbacks are patterned after the shirts worn during the first decade of the team's existence. The shoulder stripes are in a blue-white-blue pattern, and thus different from the mid-1980s reintroduction of the same style that had white-blue-white shoulder stripes instead -- and blue piping around the white numbers, which the '60s shirts did not have.

However, Pat Patriot on the helmets is the enlarged version that the team wore in the 1980s and 1990s, ordered at the time by the TV networks because the smaller version on the sides of the helmets did not show up well on television.