February 3, 2020, 4:43 a.m.

By Michael MacCambridge

I remember the instant when the bedlam overtook us. The hopes had been dimming only minutes earlier, but when Travis Kelce caught the one-yard touchdown pass from Patrick Mahomes to cut the 10-point deficit to three early in the fourth quarter Sunday evening, the packed crowd on the front porch of The Black Sheep Lodge in south Austin turned into a rollicking cauldron of partisan noise — joyful whoops and exclamations from dozens of Chiefs fans, and epithets of frustration from nearly as many 49ers fans, who were moving very rapidly from loudly confident to quietly concerned.

The transition was going in the opposite direction at my table, where all around me people were high-fiving and hugging. My friend and fellow Chiefs obsessive Aaron — who’d been so stressed out earlier in the game he was repeatedly petting a puppy at the table next to us just to calm his nerves — leaned back in overwhelmed astonishment, and asked, “Why did I become a Chiefs fan?”

I shouted the only answer that made sense at the time: “Because you wanted to feel ALIVE!,” and we all commenced with more yelling and laughing and table-pounding, and then, after the commercial, returned to active fretting.

Football games — in person or on TV — are supposed to be an ordeal, and Super Bowl LIV certainly qualified. Later on, there would be celebrating in Kansas City, and an all-night party in Miami. But on the night when Chiefs Kingdom took its rightful place on top of the football world, it’s worth noting that the same epic drama — of hope and fear and, eventually, long-overdue jubilation — was playing out on a smaller scale in almost every corner of the country.

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            When the Chiefs last won the Super Bowl, in January 1970, I was six years old and already a fanatic, sitting in my mother and stepfather’s living room in Franklin, a small town in south central Nebraska. I watched that game in a full football uniform, shoulder pads included, though I may have removed my Chiefs helmet at some point during the telecast. I vividly recall thrilling to the image of Otis Taylor high-stepping down the sideline for the game-clinching touchdown.

            Having your favorite team win a world championship at age six is fun, but it lacks a certain resonance. That was the first Super Bowl I’d ever watched; I reckoned the Chiefs would win Super Bowls regularly. The intervening 50 years cured me of that particular illusion.

            By the summer of 1971, my mom and I had moved to Kansas City, into an apartment complex where many of the Chiefs players (including Taylor and, later, Walter White and Charlie Getty) happened to live. On Christmas Day, 1971, I went through the sort of heartbreak that only a football-silly eight-year-old can experience. As the Chiefs and Miami Dolphins toiled into sudden death in the longest game ever played, that was the day I discovered the power of fervent prayer, as well as the corollary truth, as later articulated by the Texas troubadour Jon Dee Graham: “All prayers are answered/ I know that it’s so/ Sometimes the answer/ turns out to be no.”

By the late ‘70s, in high school, I found work as a Chiefs employee – wearing a polyester double-knit leisure suit as part of the “crowd control” staff, for $15 a game, up in Section 328. Those were discouraging times for Chiefs fans, part of a 15-year stretch without making a playoff appearance.

But through it all, somehow, my fanaticism remained, even deepened. Though I haven’t lived in Kansas City since 1981, the Chiefs have been one of the main connections to my hometown.

My mom has since moved to Chicago, and almost all my high school friends live in different neighborhoods further south now. So now when I think of Kansas City and “home,” the first place that comes to mind is Arrowhead.

My story is similar to a lot of dislocated Kansas Citians. Since moving away, I have returned to Arrowhead for nearly a hundred football games over the years, and have met some lifelong friends sitting in sports bars from Los Angeles to Austin to New York. What I’ve learned in that time is that the Chiefs serve as a civic glue not only within the city, but for fans throughout the country. You really can go home again. (When Chiefs’ founder Lamar Hunt was alive, he used to keep careful track of how many different states had Chiefs’ season-ticket holders; it got up to 49 at one point. “I keep hoping for one dedicated fan in New Hampshire,” he said.)

Credit where it’s due: The reawakening of Chiefs Kingdom started in 1989, when Carl Peterson took over as president and general manager, and Marty Schottenheimer was named head coach. The team became respectable and relevant again. Arrowhead, so painfully subdued throughout much of the late ’80s, was revived, and became the fortress that would go on to set world records for noise, tailgating, and playoff heartbreak. 

            In the height of the Chiefs’ early ’90s renaissance, the NFL Sunday Ticket package didn’t yet exist. Most sports bars had only one or two satellite dishes, meaning they could pick up only one or two out-of-market broadcasts at a time. So for far-flung fans who wanted to follow the Chiefs, the only way to do so was to show up to a sports bar as soon as the doors opened on Sunday mornings, find the least-hungover-looking bartender in the place, and ask him or her very politely if they might find the Chiefs game on Telstar 1. Then you’d hope the person knew how to program a satellite dish, and that a larger group of Bills or Steelers fans didn’t show up before kickoff. Even before the anxiety of watching the game there was the anxiety of finding the game.

            It’s different now, and much easier for fans outside of the Kansas City area. All the sports bars have all the games these days, and having the best quarterback in the world helps as well. Even down here in Austin, you can tell a difference; suddenly, there are multiple bars where Chiefs fans congregate, and even the kid who parks the carts at the grocery store is rocking a Mahomes jersey.

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The Black Sheep is a sprawling, gritty neighborhood bar and restaurant, located on a busy stretch of south Lamar Avenue. For the past three seasons, this has been my spot of choice. Every week, we’re at the same picnic table on the front porch, with the Kansas Citian Melissa and her husband Scott, and Travis and Aaron, two Chiefs diehards originally from Cloudcroft, New Mexico, of all places. They are all good people, far younger and far cooler than me, and able to consume much greater quantities of alcohol. But I love watching games with them because they’re smart, funny, and they care passionately about the team. Also, whether you’re from New Mexico or Kansas City, whether you’re 26 or 56, all fans suffer in pretty much the same way.

So we sit outside at one of the dozen or so picnic tables, so some of our crew can take occasional smoke breaks and still watch the game. The street is unusually loud, parking is a headache, the outdoor television screens aren’t very large, and you often can’t hear the announcers very well. But for three or four hours every Sunday, this is where absorb the serial drama of the season.

            On Sunday, we were missing Melissa and Scott (who’d recently moved to Utah), but our table was filled up anyway, with Travis’s girlfriend Natalie, Cooper’s girlfriend Francesca, in from California, and their friends Will and Kirby.

      And then the game started, and it was everything we had feared – the initial three-and-out, the long 49er drive, the rare Mahomes interception, the stretch where the 49ers offense seemed to be wearing down the Chiefs, then the even rarer second Mahomes interception.

But from these same picnic benches we’ve watched the legend unfold, and we’ve learned to keep the faith. As the tide turned in the Chiefs’ favor, and the 49ers supporters grew sullen, our crew didn’t gloat. Mostly, we just kept looking up in amazement at our good fortune. After Kendall Fuller’s game-clinching interception, our table was full of joy but not many coherent sentences. We recognized the game was one then, but we still didn’t fully understand it.

The muscle memory has for so long been geared toward playoff disappointment that it’s going to take a while to adjust to the new paradigm. In the meantime, we will observe the dramatic comebacks and Mahomes’ heroics with admiring stupefaction. Or as my buddy Rob, up in suburban Dallas, put it: “I don’t know what I just watched, but that was incredible.”

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            If, like me, you’re fortunate enough to remember not only all the playoff gut-punches of the past half-century but also the glory of that 1969 season, the gratitude for this Super Bowl win comes in stereo. I’m thrilled for the 2019 Chiefs, but also for the 1969 Chiefs, who meant so much to the emerging identity of the city. And especially for that trio of Willie Lanier, Bobby Bell and Jan Stenerud, each named to the NFL’s All-Century team, and each of whom missed the Super Bowl IV victory parade 50 years ago because they had to fly directly to Houston for the last AFL All-Star Game.

            I hope they’ll be in the parade this week. It has been a long and often agonizing wait, for them and for us.     

Once the clock counted down Sunday night and the confetti cannons fired in Miami, my group ordered a bottle of champagne, we toasted, we hugged and reveled in the moment. We were 700 miles from Kansas City and 1,300 miles from Miami, but we felt connected to it all: to the team, to the city, and to all the people we knew who shared this passion. I thought of my high school friend Reggie, who drove down from Rockford, Illinois in the brutal snowstorm to be there for the Chiefs-Texans playoff game. And I thought of the large crowds of Chiefs fans I’d been a part of over the years, at Big Charlie’s Saloon in Philadelphia and Weber’s Front Row in St. Louis. After I paid my tab, I looked down at my phone, and I had 63 text messages, including one from as far away as Sri Lanka.

Our happy cohort took one last picture, shared one last farewell, and walked out into the night, experiencing a season ending not in numbed dejection but a kind of exhilarated, bone-deep elation.

The story we are witnessing is an epic, and it’s not over yet, though this particular chapter has a supremely satisfying conclusion. Playing football games in February is fun. We really ought to do it more often.

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Michael MacCambridge has written several books, most recently ’69 Chiefs: A Team, A Season, and the Birth of Modern Kansas City. He lives in Austin, Texas.