GLENDALE, Ariz. — It was perhaps the greatest Super Bowl of all, a game full of toughness and comebacks and thrills and magic, a game with two quarterbacks — one on a bad ankle made worse when he was tackled, one with a bad shoulder that he lowered to surge his way into the end zone to tie the score — who played with so much guts and smarts and skill that neither deserved to lose, a game that will require several weeks and a federal investigative commission before anyone can begin to make sense of it.
It could have been, maybe should have been, a glorious night to end a glorious season for the Eagles. They had a rightful claim to being the best team in the NFL, and they had cruised into Super Bowl LVII on the winds of two dominant postseason performances, and with one more victory, they could call themselves the best Eagles team of all, and who would have argued with them? And there they were, with a 10-point lead at halftime Sunday night, 30 minutes from their second world championship in five years, all of that history and majesty there, right there, in their hands.
And they dropped it.
The final score said that the Kansas City Chiefs beat the Eagles here at State Farm Stadium, 38-35, on a 27-yard field goal by Harrison Butker with eight seconds left in regulation. Those are the coldest, most basic facts from Sunday, and the Chiefs should be credited for doing what the Eagles could not: On the biggest of stages, in the most important of situations, they did not beat themselves. They did not turn the ball over. The penalties they committed were not so costly. They kept coming and coming and coming, and the Eagles, too many times, in too many ways, failed to meet the measure of the moment.
Jalen Hurts, as marvelous as he was, lost the football on a fumble and kicked it away, turning into a 36-yard fumble return by Chiefs linebacker Nick Bolton and a game-tying — and game-changing — touchdown in the second quarter. Andy Reid and Patrick Mahomes Bobby Fischered Jonathan Gannon and his defense for most of the night and, more importantly, throughout the second half. Their play-calling and the manner in which they carried out those plays left the Eagles so befuddled that members of the Eagles’ secondary were yelling at each other on the field in the aftermath of leaving a couple of Kansas City receivers wide open.
And finally, in the Eagles’ last and most consequential mistake, James Bradberry grabbed JuJu Smith-Schuster for a holding penalty with 1:54 to go. The infraction allowed the Chiefs to melt the game clock for an additional 106 seconds — 106 seconds that the Eagles would have had to try to drive to tie the game.
This will be one that all the Eagles — Hurts, head coach Nick Sirianni, Gannon and his defensive staff and players, all of them — will rue and regret for a time whose length one can only imagine. There will be a natural impulse, among fans and maybe even the Eagles themselves, to blame the officiating crew for some questionable calls, or the slippery stadium turf that caused players to fall and tiptoe as if they were on an icy city street. But make no mistake: The team that had been the best in the NFL was not the better one on the field Sunday night. The Eagles’ mission was simple enough: Play a clean game, and you’ll probably win the Super Bowl. They didn’t. Not when it mattered most. Not to beat a coach as good as Reid and a quarterback as great as Mahomes.
This one will go down as an all-time game between two terrific teams, but this one will also linger for a long time in Philadelphia, and any mention of it will come with shaking heads and might-have-beens. They had it. The Eagles had it. And they let it go.
