‘Like a fantasy, and it all came true’: 2025 dud only amplifies Chiefs’ magic run
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Chiefs turned a 50-year playoff drought into sustained dynasty and global brand.
- Recent 2025 collapse, Mahomes injury and execution gaps interrupted the streak.
- Fans should balance critique with gratitude and preserve the franchise legacy.
For 50 years between championships, you might recall, Chiefs fans lived a tortured postseason existence punctuated by endlessly cruel and ghastly losses.
In that span, the Chiefs went 4-16 in the playoffs, and you were left to wonder if they were cursed, jinxed or otherwise simply destined never to win — or even play in — another Super Bowl.
Heck, in between even Chiefs first lady Norma Hunt suggested it was about time to get it together ... to her son Clark, the team’s chairman and CEO.
“‘Clark, it sure would be nice if we could play in this game while I’m still able to go,’” Clark Hunt in 2020 recalled her saying.
Then along came a magic unicorn, assuming the form of Patrick Mahomes. And against all the weight of their history and across an ever-looming series trap doors, something surreal happened:
The Chiefs not only made it back to a Super Bowl but won it, a dynamic that was aptly put by safety Tyrann Mathieu after they rallied for a 31-20 victory over the 49ers in Super Bowl LIV.
Amid the celebration, Mathieu reflected on a dinner he’d had with Mahomes and Chiefs general manager Brett Veach soon after signing with the team the previous March.
During the conversation, Mahomes said that season could be the start of a three-to-five-year run … or longer.
“I’m like, ‘OK, cool,’” Mathieu said, with a laugh. “Back then, this was like a fantasy, and it all came true.”
Who knew how prophetic that would prove to be?
But, first, remember just that initial euphoria? When anything more would just be gravy?
Maybe you screamed, hugged a lot of people or cried. And cried again. Maybe in some way you even felt like your life was complete after seeing something you’d craved for a half-century.
Just once was all you needed.
So in the weeks to come you likely were part of something known as “basking in reflected glory,” AKA “BIRGing.” As defined by the American Psychological Association, that’s the “tendency to enhance one’s self-esteem by heightening one’s association with a successful or prestigious group.”
And … it was only starting with four more Super Bowl appearances and two more wins since.
In many ways, once that past was purged Kansas City has been binging on BIRGing ever since.
Right up until the Chiefs were unceremoniously eliminated from playoff contention with a 16-13 home loss to the L.A. Chargers last week that left the Chiefs a mystifying 6-8.
Amplified by Mahomes’ season-ending knee injury, the abrupt and disillusioning decline interrupted a span like few in NFL history: seven straight AFC Championship Game appearances, five Super Bowl berths and three league titles.
Only a year ago at this time, the team was on its way to having won 23 of 24 games started by Mahomes and had a chance of becoming the first team to win three straight Super Bowls ... only to get thrashed by the Eagles.
No wonder what feels like a precipitous collapse has left many hollow and, at least in the online world, plenty howling.
And we’re not here to absolve the Chiefs for this season, one in which many of their issues have been self-inflicted. There’s much to fix, even overhaul. And this interruption, or perhaps even end, of the glory days needn’t have happened yet.
But we are here to say this: None of this ought to have been taken for granted, as Chiefs head coach Andy Reid often reminds us about Mahomes himself.
And while it’s understandable to be disappointed or frustrated, there’s also a thin line between that and the sort of entitlement you might resent in other fan bases.
The what-have-you-done-for-us-lately stuff all over the Internet is comically cynical.
What this franchise has done the last few years has been monumental and will be enduring ... even if it somehow couldn’t last forever.
That’s in terms of a legacy in NFL history, but also in altering not only how we’re viewed around the globe, where Mahomes and Travis Kelce are well-known and the Chiefs have sought to capitalize on this as the “World’s Team,” but in our own self-image.
“If you’re talking about the self-identity of sports fans from the Kansas City area, for a long time you could never say that winning is a part of your identity,” Dan Wann, a devout Chiefs fan, professor of psychology at Murray State and co-author of “Sports Fans: The Psychology And Social Impact of Fandom,” told me a couple of years ago. “Now it is.”
For that same column, I spoke with a number of prominent Kansas Citians about the impact the Chiefs’ success had on the area. Maybe Negro Leagues Baseball Museum president Bob Kendrick put it best:
“I think for those who don’t understand the power of sport and what it means to a city and to a community, you need look no further than the Chiefs. Winning permeates. Winning changes your mindset. Your disposition. And you don’t necessarily have to be a football fan. You’re still in the midst of it, and you’re feeling it.”
That’s hardly gone ... even if it’s easier to submit to feeling something quite different just now.
Perhaps you’ve turned from BIRGing to its opposite: CORFing, cutting off reflected failure, by disassociating from it one way or another. Maybe you’re just bummed out about missing out again. Or could be you’re venting about some irrational things — like Reid or Veach’s jobs — among more rational criticisms.
Indeed, the Chiefs’ stale offense, subpar run game, issues pressuring the quarterback, special-teams problems and disappearance of a certain clutch DNA are matters the team must solve if it’s going to return to the top.
While we wait to see what happens next, though, maybe it would be more practical and soothing to see it this way: through gratitude instead of rage, and perhaps some benefit of the doubt going forward.
Because however it goes from here, we’ve all just witnessed, and in some way even felt part of, a magical mystery tour no one could ever have fathomed.
Something that may well never be repeated in a league that strives to create parity.
Something conjured through a unique set of circumstances.
If Reid retired after this season, the fourth-winningest coach in NFL history almost certainly will be inducted in the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2028 — the first year he’d be eligible under the bylaw revision established in 2024.
Whenever Mahomes and Kelce are done playing, the same can be said of them in their first years on the ballot. Chris Jones will have a great case, and defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo deserves to be the first assistant coach so honored.
Beyond the individual stories, those and so many others, is the collective.
Let’s flash back again to the 2018 season, Mahomes’ first as QB1. To that point, the Chiefs had gone 4-16 in playoff games since the 1969 season and had a 9-18 franchise postseason record.
Since then, they’ve gone 17-4.
Everything changed, in other words.
So, yes, it’s jarring — brutal, even — that they’re not in the playoff mix this season.
But it’s still all been beyond a fantasy and forever worth appreciating — and all the more visible for the contrast of the moment.
This story was originally published December 19, 2025 at 6:00 AM.