Before their stupefying collapse on Sunday at Arrowhead Stadium, an era-defining moment was in the Chiefs’ grasp.
Just waiting to be seized, even.
Playing in their NFL-record fourth straight home conference championship game, they had swamped Cincinnati 21-3 in the first half and were on the verge of becoming just the fourth franchise to play in three (or more) straight Super Bowls.
The rich subplots were all in place, too. Especially as the Chiefs were at the Cincinnati 1-yard-line on the final plays of the first half with a chance to administer a likely knockout blow before what dissolved into a 27-24 overtime loss.
The win would have established a sense of franchise ownership over the AFC Championship trophy named for Lamar Hunt, the Chiefs’ founder. It had never so much as been in Kansas City before the 2018 season, and now the Chiefs were on the cusp of winning it for a third straight year as a springboard back to the Super Bowl.
Then there was the prospective matter of coach Andy Reid returning home to Los Angeles for Super Bowl LVI just miles from where he grew up … and not far from where he made his national television debut at the Los Angeles Coliseum in a halftime “Punt, Pass and Kick” competition on Monday Night Football.
The opportunity to win his second Super Bowl there, and the opportunity for his devout Chiefs players to win it for him there, would have been a major highlight even in a career brimming with them.
More than anything, else, though, the commanding lead stood as a portal to a new dimension in franchise history … and yet another affirmation that everything is just about always going to be different with Patrick Mahomes at quarterback.
After the Chiefs went to two of the first four Super Bowls, winning Super Bowl IV, it took them a half-century to get back. The time in between was punctuated by puncturing postseason losses and littered by some hapless seasons altogether, making for an abiding spirit of futility among fans.
But in the advent of Patrick Mahomes, the sense of that prevailing dynamic had been expunged.
Because that victory over the 49ers in Super Bowl LIV came with not just the exhilaration of purging 50 years of frustration, all the more through a remarkable postseason run that included becoming the first NFL team to rally from double-digit deficits in all three games.
It came with the promise of so much more ahead.
Which is why what happened Sunday was so unfathomable, including the stark offensive dropoff in the second half, a development accentuated by their inability to score on two plays from the 1-yard-line at the end of first half.
From that point on, after amassing 311 yards in the first 30 minutes, the Chiefs had a total of 83 yards in the second half and overtime.
And Mahomes, who had been unstoppable in the first half, was off-kilter almost the entire way after the intermission:
He threw two interceptions, including the one that snuffed out the Chiefs overtime drive and set up the Bengals game-winning kick. And he was sacked twice late in regulation with the Chiefs on the cusp of scoring a late go-ahead touchdown.
We’re so conditioned to seeing the Chiefs concoct preposterous comebacks that it seemed impossible to see them bungle a lead like this in the age of Mahomes, who has proven himself a master of the rally and had never presided over an NFL game that went this way.
It’s not the end of this era, of course.
But it is a reminder of how fleeting and precious this window of opportunity really is, especially given the competition that will be furnished for years to come by the likes of Cincinnati’s Joe Burrow, Buffalo’s Josh Allen and the Chargers’ Justin Herbert.
Mahomes is still so young, 26 years old. But a great nucleus around him won’t be here forever, even if it still feels like that.
There will be flux ahead, and there will be contracts to sort out. Managing how to keep the core of this group together while also replenishing and improving is a delicate art with no assurances.
The ghost of the 1969 Chiefs, who were on the edge of aging out when they won Super Bowl IV, is something this Chiefs front office has to be cognizant of and vigilant about not allowing to happen again.
It took 21 years, after all, for the Chiefs to win another playoff game after that.
That’s an extreme example, of course. The real issue for the Chiefs seems both less dramatic and more high-wire all at once:
How do they maximize the Mahomes Era and not squander all that has been implied by his arrival?
Because even when the Chiefs last lost in the postseason at Arrowhead, 37-31 to the Patriots in overtime in the AFC Championship Game three years ago, it wasn’t hard to understand that it wasn’t just more of the same postseason torture.
The underlying takeaway then was that with the 23-year-old Mahomes, on his way to being named most valuable player in the NFL, that moment stood to be as much a beginning as an end.
It wasn’t “same old Chiefs;” it came with an abiding sense of a new beginning and that they’d be back on that stage soon if not immediately.
With a boost from a radically overhauled defense, back they were a year later. And then some, securing the first Super Bowl triumph in five decades and returning a year later.
After a balky 3-4 start to this season, they came to appear destined to return again. There was the incredible comeback last weekend against Buffalo, 13 seconds to glory, as we’ve been calling it.
And then there was that 21-3 lead on Sunday.
But whatever winning against Buffalo that way seemed to suggest, whatever that early lead Sunday seemed to indicate, it all evaporated after halftime on Sunday.
And now it leaves us with a bigger question:
Remarkably, the Chiefs have made their way into the NFL’s final four for four straight years now and come away with one Super Bowl title. That’s an absolutely incredible run in itself, but it’s also one marked by falling short of the ultimate …
With the clock ticking on how long this window of opportunity to win more Super Bowls will remain viable.
“Anything less than that is not success …,” Mahomes said. “This isn’t our standard.”
