four play
Quartet of QBs batle to reach NFL climax
NFC CHAMPIONSHIP PACKERS at FALCONS 3:05 P.M. • FOX AFC CHAMPIONSHIP StEELERS at PATRIOTS 6:40 P.M. • CBS
A TLANTA — Both of these teams, both of these quarterbacks, know that this isn’t going to be good enough — not in the morning, not next week, or next month, or five years from now.
There will be few wide eyes among most of the Falcons and the Packers when they gather inside the Georgia Dome on Sunday for the NFC Championship. Certainly not the two most celebrated sets of eyes. They already have seen too much. They know what it is to get this far then have your heart stomped on.
“I’m numb … that’s the best way to describe what I’m feeling right now. Numb.”
That was Matt Ryan four years and two days ago, Jan. 20 2013, standing at a podium in this very same building. The Falcons had looked like Superteam early in the day, had raced to a commanding 17-0 lead against the 49ers. Ryan mostly had played pitch-and-catch all day with Julio Jones … And t he reason he was numb was because, somehow, the Niners had stormed all the way back, behind the arm and the legs of Colin Kaepernick (yes, four years can seem as short — or as long—as you want it to be). Frank Gore scored twice in the second half. The Falcons’ last-ditch, last-minute drive stalled at t he San Francisco 1 0- yard line. And you never heard silence that sounded so deaf- ening as Falcons fans trudged out of the Dome, 28-24 losers that day. “We’ll learn from this,” Ryan said in the aftermath. “Although I would have preferred to be getting ready to go to New Orleans,” where the 49ers lost to the Ravens two weeks later.
Aaron Rodgers, Mike McCarthy and the Packers at least have a Super Bowl, earned in 2011, to soften the string of sickening season-ending losses that have befallen them in the years since, starting with the very next year, when the Giants walked into Lambeau Field and knocked the 15-1 Pack out of the postseason.
Three straight years, the Packers have been eliminated on the final play of their season; once on a Phil Dawson field goal in a wild-card game against the 49ers, last year on a Larry Fitzgerald touchdown pass in an overtime that was forced only because one of Rodgers’ patented Hail Mary slings had been caught in the end zone at the fourth-quarter gun by Jeff Janis.
But the truly harrowing loss was on Jan. 18, 2015, in Seattle, in their most recent visit to the NFC title game. The Packers stormed to a 16-0 lead at the half. Rus- sell Wilson threw four interceptions in what was one of the worst big-game performances by an established quarterback anyone ever had seen.
Green Bay still led 19-7 approaching the two-minute warning when Wilson scored from 1 yard out to make it 19-14. Out of timeouts, the Seahawks tried an onside kick, the ball skidded off Green Bay’s Brandon Bostick’s hands, and Chris Matthews recovered. Four plays later Marshawn Lynch scored from 26 yards out. And though Rodgers led a desperate game-tying drive in one minute afterward, the Packers never saw the ball in OT, Wilson finding Jermaine Kearse for a 35-yard TD almost four minutes deep.
“Sometimes,” McCarthy said when that epic was over, “you have to seriously ask yourself what you have to do to finish a game like this.”
So this is the baggage both teams, and both quarterbacks, will drag into Georgia Dome today. For Rodgers, a win would mean a crack at a second Super Bowl and joining his generational peers Tom Brady, Eli Manning and Ben Roethlisberger as quarterbacks with more than one championship to their credit. For Ryan, it would mean qualifying for his first Super Bowl and climbing one rung higher up the ladder of elites.
“You cherish every opportunity you get to play in games like these,” Rodgers said earlier this week.
“We don’t ever want to feel,” Ryan said, “the way we felt [against the 49ers].”
Someone’s heartbreak is going to dissolve into the ether by about 6 o’clock. And someone’s is going to grow only deeper and more desperate.