Joe Burrow spent the balance of the season telling anyone who’d listen that the old Bengals were dead and gone, that this group he was growing with wasn’t going to live down to any sort of previous expectations, that the wheels weren’t going to suddenly come off like so many people thought they would.
Yet, even for him, this was something else. Pretty wild? Burrow laughed through the cellphone.
“Yeah, it is,” he acknowledged.
So, yes, a few months ago, the mere idea of the totality of what just went down at raucous Arrowhead Stadium would’ve been a bit much. Even for him. But by the time Bengals got here, the truth is, anything seemed possible to Burrow and to everyone else on his team.
“I think if you had told me before the season, I would’ve been very surprised,” Burrow admitted. “But I’m not surprised right now because we’ve gone through a whole year. I know the kind of team that we have, and I know the guys that we have in the locker room. So right now, I’m not surprised. But if you were going to tell me after last season or in OTAs, I think I would’ve called you crazy.”
Following last season, Burrow was in California, rehabbing from December ACL surgery. In OTAs, through May and June, he was still limited, and his team was just trying to get its head above water after a 6-25-1 start to Zac Taylor’s time as head coach.
Less than a year later, they’ve all proved that anything is indeed possible. Cincinnati dethroned the two-time defending AFC champion Chiefs on Sunday. The Bengals are going to the Super Bowl for the first time in 33 years.
“If you’re a competitor and you believe in what you’re doing, you dreamed about this day every day of your life,” Taylor told me, as he boarded the bus. “And every single day that I’ve driven home from work, I’ve envisioned the people on the streets out there celebrating, getting ready for a parade. I think anybody that’s ever done anything special, or been a part of anything special, has had those same dreams. And we hope to make them reality.”
They’ll have that chance in a week. But for at least a night, they were going to drink this in.
Because how they got here, coming back from down 21–3 against a championship team that came out of the gate like a thoroughbred, is just as incredible as the once-unthinkable concept just that they got here in the first place.
