MIAMI GARDENS, Fla. — This is the frontier justice of sports, isn’t it? Sometimes, the celestial scriptwriters who make all of this possible make you grind through bunkers and mud piles and patches of black ice and all manner of windmills before granting you entry to the top of the mountain.

Sometimes you are the Cubs, with 108 empty Octobers in the books, and they make you go to extra innings, sit through a rain delay in Game 7 of the World Series. Sometimes, you are the Red Sox, lugging an 86-year burden on your back, and they make you overcome three-games-to-none against your ancient rivals before letting you dash to the duck boats.

Sometimes you are the Rangers, and before your fans are allowed to die in peace they make you endure a couple of Game 7s that stop your heart and fry your nerves. It isn’t easy to be a sports fan sometimes; nobody ever said it would be.


And sometimes you are the Kansas City Chiefs, enduring one playoff hardship after another across 50 championship-free football seasons. And even when you do get a season like this one, they add degrees of difficulty to your journey every week. You fall behind 24-0 in one game, recover. You fall behind 10-0 the next game, recover.

And Sunday, in the biggest game the franchise has played in half a century, 8 minutes and 53 seconds left in the season, you’ve spotted the San Francisco 49ers a 20-10 lead. Ten points down, less than 10 to go against one of the stoutest and stingiest defenses on the planet.


The Chiefs celebrate winning Super Bowl 2020.Anthony J. Causi
If the Chiefs wanted to be champions, if they wanted to deliver the most devoted legion of fans anywhere a championship five decades in the making, that’s what they needed to overcome. That’s all. That’s it.


On the sidelines, a star-crossed football coach named Andy Reid shouted into the earhole of his star-dappled quarterback.

“Keep firing, keep believing in your guys,” Reid told Patrick Mahomes, who’d been less than his all-world self most of this day, who’d thrown two picks, who looked a little sore-armed in big spots across the game’s first 45 minutes.

“We preached it all season long,” Mahomes said. “Our guys keep fighting.”

The Niners had all the momentum. They had the game by the throat. Two scores up, the Lombardi Trophy that close to their hands. A sixth championship so close the players could almost see the letters engraved on the trophy.


“We’d played as well as we’d hoped to play,” cornerback Richard Sherman said. “We were right there.”

The Chiefs had to be perfect. And they were perfect. There was a 10-play, 83-yard drive that melted less than three minutes off the clock, the key play a third-and-15 from their own 35, a do-or-die call that only a quarterback with the gifts, the gravity and the gumption of Mahomes would even attempt, let alone complete, 44 yards to Tyreek Hill who somehow found a gaping green cavity in the 49ers defense.

It was 20-17. Now it was the Chiefs defense that needed to come face-to-face with its season, needed a three-and-out, got a three-and-out.


“We had zero doubt we would make plays there,” said Tyrann Mathieu, KC’s all-pro safety. “We had such a good season and were so well prepared. I knew we were ready.”

And in what felt like a flash, they were in the end zone again, another key toss from Mahomes, 38 yards to Sammy Watkins setting it up, and then a tiptoe touchdown from Damien Williams. The Chiefs led 24-20. They scored again late.

It ended 31-20. It ended with red-and-yellow confetti littering the field, and with Kansas Citians pouring into the places that make their town so unique, the Fire and Light District, Westport, the Country Club Plaza. They love the Royals in Kansas City, and their college basketball teams. The Chiefs are something else. The Chiefs are their why, and their wherefore.

Fifty excruciating years. And now this.

“Chiefs nation!” Clark Hunt, son of founder Lamar, dressed as his father dressed for his Super Bowls in black blazer with the KC logo on the breast, crowed when it was finally over. “This one’s for you!”

Fifty years? Piece of cake. Twenty-four-nothing, and 10-0? Going forward it’ll all feel like part of the plan. Ten down to 11 up in the Super Bowl, same path they’d taken all postseason, ending a championship drought in the sweetest possible way? Why, of course Sometimes, that’s the only way.

Ref;nypost.com