On September 30, 2014, I was a senior in college, in rehearsal for a musical, when my phone started going off.
“TKP, are you seeing this right now?”
“You’re watching this game, right?”
“Dude, holy shit.”
It was the Royals’ AL Wild Card game. The one with 12 innings. The one with the Salvy base hit. I caught the last few plays in a friend’s dorm room sitting beside my wonderful theatre friends who had never cared about baseball in their lives, fielding texts from classmates watching the game elsewhere. It felt good to be “the friend from Kansas City.”
It still does.
I was also in rehearsal a few weeks later when we lost the World Series to a pitcher who was as unflappable in game seven as Saberhagen had been against the Cardinals 29 years before. The game was at Kauffman. They turned the fountains orange, I learned, immediately after the final out.
We were a classy city, I told my friends. A city used to being the underdog. To being gracious. To being grateful. To getting further than was expected. To not being expected to get very far.
The next year, we won the whole thing.
I had just moved to New York City and didn’t yet have cable or even working internet in my apartment. I watched the play by play on my MLB app. At 1:18AM EST, the notification popped up on the bottom of the screen along with a single red dot.
Wade Davis, called strike, 3 out.
In the years that followed, the team was stripped for parts, as we always knew we would be. I grew up saying goodbye to Johnny Damon, Jermaine Dye, Zach Greinke (the first time), and, my personal most crushing, Carlos Beltran. So it felt like its own Kansas City tradition to bid farewell to Hosmer and Cain and Moustakas and Ben “here for a good time not for a long time” Zobrist. The 2016 World Series MVP.
At least Gordo and Salvy stayed.
The same thing happened with the Chiefs over the course of my youth, in which it seemed like the natural conclusion of every stellar season was losing to the Colts. Our great running backs would sparkle for a moment and then something would go wrong. Trent Green and Alex Smith were great men and good football players. And when the closest thing we had to a stand-out Kansas City franchise player, Tony Gonzalez (RIP KC Baja Fresh), left us, we couldn’t be mad. The man deserved a real chance at a ring. All we who wanted the best for him could do was wish luck and hope beyond hope that his Hall of Fame picture would have him in yellow and red. (It does).
An excellent Kansas City team had always been a thing to be savored. An unexpected treat. A temporary alignment of the stars and soul of the city before teams with more money step in and reset the equilibrium.
We would always joyfully, graciously, and good-naturedly turn back into a pumpkin.
Until now.
I’ve always said, and still maintain, that I would hate to be a Yankees or Patriots or Lakers fan. That I would never want to trade special victories for anticipated ones. Some people thrive on the whole world actively wanting them to fail. I get more of a kick out of them passively expecting it.
And for 25 years, that was what it felt like to be from Kansas City. Not “counted out” per se but “lucky” to be anywhere we were.
In 2019, when the crowds at Power and Light were put up on television screens across the globe during the Women’s World Cup, I savored the moment. That’s who we are, I thought. How lucky that the world got a glimpse.
Then, in 2020, we won the Super Bowl. For the first time in 30 years. In the apartment of my New York Football Watching Friend™ who is a lifelong Pats fan, I lay on the floor with my hands on my face in a room of Eagles, Packers, and 49ers fans and my Colombian fiancé, cousins, and friends who had adopted Kansas City as their home team (and who were mostly there for Shakira). We won. World Champions! Only five years later!
What a wonderful and special ending, I thought, to what was surely Patrick Mahomes’ last season with the likes of us.
And then the 10 year contract.
And then the AFC champions again.
And then Paul Rudd being named sexiest man alive.
And then the Men’s World Cup announcement.
And then the Current.
And now, this. These Chiefs. Again. Three times in four years.
What kind of underdogs are we now?
I used to strain my eyes watching the B-Roll of NFL and MLB commercials looking for a single glimpse of my hometown team. Now there’s a Chiefs jersey on the front of Madden.
I was glad that our second Super Bowl appearance in as many years was against Tom Brady. He was the only possible Goliath in our increasingly more in-vain quest to remain David.
This year, we were bittersweetly blessed with a high ankle sprain, Joe Freakin’ Burrow, and a little bit of extra noise.
Still, somehow still, we are the comeback kids. Even as we keep coming back and coming back to the top of the heap.
An electricity still ripples through our city. An excitement that hasn’t quite given itself over to expectation.
Which is not to say we shouldn’t reckon with the responsibility that this increased exposure and a greater national identity bring –we can’t get to the Super Bowl three times in four years with one of the only Native American names that still exists in professional sports and expect to fly under the radar– only that we’re on a track to level up. The world is going to stop getting a glimpse, and they’re going to start taking a look. And I’m as giddy for that new phase as I am nervous for it.
But for now, I’m still savoring this team and this climb. Devouring incredible local stories about the NFL MVP’s high school interceptions and how the loudest voice in Arrowhead was honed by the softer, confident voice of his big brother and current Super Bowl rival. Soaking up the buzz of red and gold that even after the past five years still seems to hum “can you believe this shit?”
The Kansas City Chiefs are playing in the Super Bowl on Sunday.
I’m not used to being used to this.
I hope I never am.