It was not pretty or efficient or awe-inspiring.
But two weeks from now, when the Green Bay Packers take the field in Arlington, Tex., for the fourth Super Bowl appearance in the history of that ancient, small-town franchise, the esthetic failings of Sunday afternoon will be long forgotten.
The two-week breaks before the big game tend to inspire that kind of amnesia, and in any case, the wild story of the Packers’ season deserves to supplant any memories of their messy 21-14 victory over the Chicago Bears in the National Football Conference championship game.
This is a team that lost 14 players for the season to injury, including its No. 1 running back, Ryan Grant, in the first game of the year. They bounced up and down, survived when quarterback Aaron Rodgers was temporarily felled by a concussion, never trailed by more than seven points in any game, but still had to win their final two to become the sixth and last playoff qualifier in their conference.
That meant hitting the road for the playoffs, first to Philadelphia and Atlanta before meeting their historic rivals at frigid Soldier Field, in a game that they could have made a whole lot easier, but in a game they still managed to win.
“The biggest difference between this team and the team the previous two years? It’s just character,” Rodgers said, and if character in sports is the same thing as being able to battle through adversity, he has it right.
That said, Sunday could and should have been a cakewalk. The Packers rolled down the field all but effortlessly after taking the opening kickoff, scoring on rookie James Starks’s one-yard touchdown run. They were up 14-0 at the half, though it felt far more one-sided than that. Jay Cutler and the Bears offence, which had looked so good against Seattle the week before, couldn’t move the ball with any consistency, and were never a threat to score.
Cutler banged up his left knee late in the first half, and after giving it a try in the third quarter, left the game (in a testy postgame press conference, Cutler had to field questions suggesting that he might have found a way to continue. His coach, Lovie Smith, rallied to his defence: “Hey guys, he hurt his knee and he was out. He couldn’t go and that was that. Let’s go on to some other questions.”)
Elderly career backup Todd Collins came in for two disastrous series, then Smith opted to hand the ball to his third-stringer, untested 25-year-old Colorado State product Caleb Hanie.
Under NFL rules, bringing in the otherwise inactive third quarterback before the fourth quarter meant that Smith couldn’t go back to Collins or Cutler even if Hanie got hurt. Down 14-0 with nothing happening on offence, he opted to roll the dice.
But the Packers still couldn’t salt the game away. Deep in Chicago territory in the third quarter with a chance to go up by three scores, Rodgers threw an interception to Bears linebacker Brian Urlacher, then had to make a touchdown-saving tackle.
“It was a terrible throw,” Rodgers acknowledged. “As soon as I threw it, I started sprinting [after Urlacher]. Then when he turned to face me, I knew I had to make a stand.”
In the fourth quarter, Hanie surprised everyone, perhaps including himself, by leading the Bears to a touchdown, but then seemed to have lost the game when, deep in Bears territory, he threw a pass right into the arms of mammoth, 338-pound nose tackle B.J. Raji, who strolled into the end zone, making it 21-7 with 6:04 to play.
Back came Hanie again, engineering a touchdown drive in a no-huddle offence in less than a minute and a half, tearing up a strangely passive Green Bay defence.
“We were right there at the end,” Urlacher said. It wasn’t until rookie safety Sam Shields picked off a fourth-down Hanie pass in Green Bay territory with 37 seconds left on the clock that the contest was finally decided.
And with that game now consigned to history, the talk heading for Texas will be about the how the cheesehead torch has finally been passed, how after arriving in the long shadow of Brett Favre and then playing the flashy new, young flame in the messy breakup between the quarterback, the franchise and its fans, Rodgers has put himself in position to be right there with the heroes of Lambeau Field.
“There’s a kind of a ladder that you have to climb,” Green Bay coach Mike McCarthy said. “The first rung is showing people that you belong as a starter. Then you have to win big games. The next step is you have to win playoff games.
“Now Aaron gets a chance to challenge for the last rung – to be a Super Bowl-winning quarterback.”
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