After playing in his first football game since Oct. 28, 2018, on Sunday, linebacker Reuben Foster said, “It felt great.”

Then came Monday.

“Afterwards is the big question,” Foster said on Wednesday. “… It was just one day of soreness. I haven’t played this game in four years.”

The state’s Class 6A Lineman of the Year at Auburn High School and the Butkus Award winner as the nation’s best linebacker at Alabama, Foster made his comeback in the Pittsburgh Maulers’ 22-15 loss to the New Orleans Breakers in a USFL game on Sunday.

The game brought Foster back to Alabama to play because the Breakers are sharing Protective Stadium in Birmingham with the Birmingham Stallions this season.

“It felt great,” Foster said on Sunday night. “It felt wonderful to be back home. But it feels bad to lose.”

Foster led Pittsburgh with 12 tackles, including 10 solo stops, and forced a fumble.

“I felt myself getting comfortable,” Foster said. “I had to get the jitters out. It’d been four years since I played this game, but I’m so blessed to play it. I get paid, I get a check to play the game that I played since I was a little kid. Just to play this game, it was great.

“I’m not the type of guy to want to just go make a play, want to make a play because guys tend to mess up like that. I’m going to do like (Alabama) coach (Nick) Saban say and like (Pittsburgh) coach (Ray) Horton say. That’s do your job and form your own lane. I just want to do my job for my guys and go in battle with them and just have their back.”

With New Orleans backed up to the Pittsburgh 1-yard line in the second quarter, Foster knocked the football out of the grasp of Breakers running back Anthony Jones, and linebacker Kyahva Tezino recovered the fumble for a touchdown as the Maulers took a 9-6 lead with 8:21 left in the first half.

“Shoot, it was just a hard-nosed, downhill, hard count, looking for everything we could look for,” Foster said. “It was just an adrenaline play, and God blessed me.”

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After missing the final eight games of the 2018 NFL season, Foster tore the anterior cruciate ligament and lateral collateral ligament in his left knee during an offseason practice with the Washington Redskins on May 20, 2019.

The former first-round draft pick spent two years on Washington’s injured reserve before being out of the game in the 2021 and 2022 seasons.

Horton said the Maulers are glad to be the team that has gotten Foster back on the field.

“He’s a legitimate player,” Horton said. “He’s a heck of a man — a leader. He’s a guy that wants to have the play come down to him. He exemplifies what we want to be on defense. He’s everything I can hope for, and the men look toward him. So do I. He has all my respect, and he’s a phenomenal player. When you watch him in the classroom and how the players watch and respect him, he really is that light on the hill. He really is for us.”

The Maulers play the New Jersey Generals at noon CDT Sunday at Tom Benson Hall of Fame Stadium in Canton, Ohio. It will be the opener of a doubleheader with the team that shares the field with Pittsburgh – the Philadelphia Stars. The Michigan Panthers and the Stars square off at 6 p.m. Sunday. NBC and Peacock will televise the first game, with FS1 carrying the second.

“I would call this a rivalry,” Foster said. “We scrimmaged them two times in this training camp, and it was kind of tough. It was, like, heated on both sides. It’s kind of a rivalry game.”

Mark Inabinett is a sports reporter for Alabama Media Group. Follow him on Twitter at @AMarkG1.