OCRegister: In Superdome’s silence, Rams take giant step to the Super Bowl
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In Superdome’s silence, Rams take giant step to the Super Bowl
By Ryan Kartje | rkartje@scng.com | Orange County Register
PUBLISHED: January 20, 2019 at 7:11 pm | UPDATED: January 20, 2019 at 7:46 pm
NEW ORLEANS — The silence was deafening. It filled every nook and cranny of the cavernous Mercedes Benz Superdome, a low din bouncing from sideline to sideline and up and down towering bleachers filled with twirling white towels, where tens of thousands here – and millions more elsewhere – held their collective breaths.
Up until that point, before kicker Greg Zuerlein would line up for an improbable 57-yard kick that would send the Los Angeles Rams to the Super Bowl, this vast football cathedral was filled to its brim with a thunderous, unrelenting roar, one so powerful that it literally shook hunks of loose drywall from the stadium’s bowels.
It was no wonder that, until Zuerlein’s kick, the Saints hadn’t lost a playoff game here since 2000 when the Rams wunderkind coach Sean McVay was merely a high school freshman. His young quarterback, Jared Goff, spent most of the game cupping his hands over his helmet to hear McVay’s play calls, before eventually taping the holes shut on either side. The Rams offensive linemen struggled to hear anything outside of the lineman next to him, who was left to scream audibles into those same ear holes, before passing the message down the line for others to hear.
“I’ve never played in anything louder than that ever,” said Andrew Whitworth, the Rams left tackle, who hadn’t won a playoff game in his 13 NFL seasons until last week.
But as they stood on the sideline, their hearts beating through their chests, the noise that rung in their ears for hours melted away. As Zuerlein lined up for a game-winning field goal that will assuredly go down in the annals of franchise history, only the silence remained. And in that silence was an aura of self-assurance that so few teams would prove capable of mustering.
For the Rams, it had been well earned. That process began three years earlier, when the team moved across the country to a city that wasn’t sure yet how to feel about its presence. It continued a year later, when team president Kevin Demoff and general manager Les Snead walked out of an interview, convinced they’d found the coach that could lift the franchise from the league’s lowest rungs.
But this year, it was earned in more subtle, but powerful ways, through the trials and tribulations that pile up over the course of a season spent in contention. The first bit of adversity had struck here, in fact, in this very stadium, as the Saints dealt the Rams their first defeat back in November. From there, the obstacles, big and small, seemed to come in coordinated succession.
Massive wildfires that displaced players and staff. A mass shooting not far from their team facility. A city consumed by heartbreak. On the field, the Rams dropped two games in a row, and the bandwagon emptied. Still, their resolve stuck. “We’ve been through it all,” said cornerback Sam Shields, who just a year ago . “We’ve fought, and we’ve fought.”
Through it all, the disasters and the heartbreak and the usual Sisyphysian slog of a season, the Rams were still standing, watching from the sideline as the kick soared in what seemed like silent, slow motion.
Center John Sullivan had been here before, in this exact moment, almost a decade prior. He’d watched as Drew Brees and the Saints drove the field on the Vikings defense, and he’d stared in disbelief as the Saints lined up for a game-winning field goal in overtime.
That would be his last meaningful chance at a Super Bowl until Sunday, and the memory came surging back in those final moments as Zuerlein’s kick hung in midair.
“It feels like it was a long time coming back around,” Sullivan said.
John Johnson could only understand in theory what the long wait had felt like for Sullivan and other veterans like him in the locker room. This was only the young safety’s second season, after all, and as he came down with the floating, overtime interception that would soon lead to Zuerlein’s field goal, he only had an inkling of what it meant. “It took forever for that ball to come down,” he said. But as he grinned from aside his locker, his teammates buzzing around him, he let the glory of a moment he won’t soon forget sink in.
“That’s a play you have to make,” Johnson said. “You have to make it. I didn’t want the moment to get bigger than making the play.”
But the moment that came soon after, as Zuerlein’s kick split the uprights, as the roar of the Rams elated sideline cut through the silence, felt bigger than life, as if it’d been fated all along.
An hour later, in the afterglow of a cramped visitor’s locker room, after winning a game they so easily could have lost, after stamping their tickets to the Super Bowl, two weeks from now in Atlanta, Sullivan sat back at his locker. “I’m just breathing this all in,” he said, and with that, the 34-year old center let the buzz of a Super Bowl-bound celebration wash over him.
[www.ocregister.com]
By Ryan Kartje | rkartje@scng.com | Orange County Register
PUBLISHED: January 20, 2019 at 7:11 pm | UPDATED: January 20, 2019 at 7:46 pm
NEW ORLEANS — The silence was deafening. It filled every nook and cranny of the cavernous Mercedes Benz Superdome, a low din bouncing from sideline to sideline and up and down towering bleachers filled with twirling white towels, where tens of thousands here – and millions more elsewhere – held their collective breaths.
Up until that point, before kicker Greg Zuerlein would line up for an improbable 57-yard kick that would send the Los Angeles Rams to the Super Bowl, this vast football cathedral was filled to its brim with a thunderous, unrelenting roar, one so powerful that it literally shook hunks of loose drywall from the stadium’s bowels.
It was no wonder that, until Zuerlein’s kick, the Saints hadn’t lost a playoff game here since 2000 when the Rams wunderkind coach Sean McVay was merely a high school freshman. His young quarterback, Jared Goff, spent most of the game cupping his hands over his helmet to hear McVay’s play calls, before eventually taping the holes shut on either side. The Rams offensive linemen struggled to hear anything outside of the lineman next to him, who was left to scream audibles into those same ear holes, before passing the message down the line for others to hear.
“I’ve never played in anything louder than that ever,” said Andrew Whitworth, the Rams left tackle, who hadn’t won a playoff game in his 13 NFL seasons until last week.
But as they stood on the sideline, their hearts beating through their chests, the noise that rung in their ears for hours melted away. As Zuerlein lined up for a game-winning field goal that will assuredly go down in the annals of franchise history, only the silence remained. And in that silence was an aura of self-assurance that so few teams would prove capable of mustering.
For the Rams, it had been well earned. That process began three years earlier, when the team moved across the country to a city that wasn’t sure yet how to feel about its presence. It continued a year later, when team president Kevin Demoff and general manager Les Snead walked out of an interview, convinced they’d found the coach that could lift the franchise from the league’s lowest rungs.
But this year, it was earned in more subtle, but powerful ways, through the trials and tribulations that pile up over the course of a season spent in contention. The first bit of adversity had struck here, in fact, in this very stadium, as the Saints dealt the Rams their first defeat back in November. From there, the obstacles, big and small, seemed to come in coordinated succession.
Massive wildfires that displaced players and staff. A mass shooting not far from their team facility. A city consumed by heartbreak. On the field, the Rams dropped two games in a row, and the bandwagon emptied. Still, their resolve stuck. “We’ve been through it all,” said cornerback Sam Shields, who just a year ago . “We’ve fought, and we’ve fought.”
Through it all, the disasters and the heartbreak and the usual Sisyphysian slog of a season, the Rams were still standing, watching from the sideline as the kick soared in what seemed like silent, slow motion.
Center John Sullivan had been here before, in this exact moment, almost a decade prior. He’d watched as Drew Brees and the Saints drove the field on the Vikings defense, and he’d stared in disbelief as the Saints lined up for a game-winning field goal in overtime.
That would be his last meaningful chance at a Super Bowl until Sunday, and the memory came surging back in those final moments as Zuerlein’s kick hung in midair.
“It feels like it was a long time coming back around,” Sullivan said.
John Johnson could only understand in theory what the long wait had felt like for Sullivan and other veterans like him in the locker room. This was only the young safety’s second season, after all, and as he came down with the floating, overtime interception that would soon lead to Zuerlein’s field goal, he only had an inkling of what it meant. “It took forever for that ball to come down,” he said. But as he grinned from aside his locker, his teammates buzzing around him, he let the glory of a moment he won’t soon forget sink in.
“That’s a play you have to make,” Johnson said. “You have to make it. I didn’t want the moment to get bigger than making the play.”
But the moment that came soon after, as Zuerlein’s kick split the uprights, as the roar of the Rams elated sideline cut through the silence, felt bigger than life, as if it’d been fated all along.
An hour later, in the afterglow of a cramped visitor’s locker room, after winning a game they so easily could have lost, after stamping their tickets to the Super Bowl, two weeks from now in Atlanta, Sullivan sat back at his locker. “I’m just breathing this all in,” he said, and with that, the 34-year old center let the buzz of a Super Bowl-bound celebration wash over him.
[www.ocregister.com]
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