Thanks to quarterback Patrick Mahomes and a stout defense, Kansas City started to rewrite an ugly postseason history and advanced to the A. F. C. Championship.
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The stories passed down about the Kansas City Chiefs’ playoff malfunctions might sound apocryphal, as if embellished over a game of telephone, but they’re not. Really.
The fans who jammed Arrowhead Stadium on Saturday can recite detail after grisly detail. So can those who roamed Kansas City’s sideline: Many of them added to the misery last year, two years ago, three years ago, five.
One player changed the calculus. His ascension terminated an era of despair. His quarterbacking brilliance inoculated the fan base. In his grand playoff unveiling, Patrick Lavon Mahomes II purged a quarter-century of Arrowhead futility.
After every first down, every score, every defensive stop, fans in the upper deck flung snowballs in glee. They kept coming, much like the top-seeded Chiefs, who blitzed their postseason nemesis, the Indianapolis Colts, 31-13, in an A. F. C. divisional game.
The A. F. C. champion receives a trophy named for Lamar Hunt, the founder and owner of the Chiefs, who have played for it only once since 1970 — in 1994, the last time, incidentally, that Kansas City won a home playoff game. The Chiefs have never played for the trophy at Arrowhead, which will host the Los Angeles Chargers or the New England Patriots next Sunday afternoon to determine the conference representative in Super Bowl LIII.
The climax of Saturday’s game came with 2 minutes 23 seconds left, as Darrel Williams plowed into the end zone for the final score. Peeling away from the crowd, Mahomes windmilled his fist, aware in that moment of what he — what all of the Chiefs — had accomplished.
And so now, after 47 years, this sentence can be written: The Chiefs, finally, have more playoff victories at Arrowhead than the Colts. It’s O.
