Peyton Manning Finally Got His Ring

I need you to understand something before I tell you about February 4, 2007.

Being a Colts fan in the years leading up to that Super Bowl wasn't just frustrating. It was a specific kind of suffering that only makes sense if you were in it. We had one of the greatest quarterbacks to ever play the game. We had the weapons. We had the regular seasons — year after year, the offense was historically good. And every single January, something happened.

The 2003 AFC Championship. Gone. The Patriots, Ty Law picking off Manning three times, Belichick's defense making our offense look like it was playing in slow motion. We lost 24-14 and it wasn't even that close. The 2004 AFC Championship. Gone again. New England again. Different game, same result, same sick feeling.

And then 2005. That one was different because it came with hope attached to it. The Colts went 14-2. Fourteen wins. We were going to do it this time. Pittsburgh came to town for the divisional round and Jerome Bettis — Jerome Bettis, who hadn't fumbled in something like 136 straight carries — fumbled. Nick Harper scooped it and was gone. He was literally gone, nothing but open field between him and the end zone, and then Ben Roethlisberger made the most improbable shoelace tackle in playoff history. The Colts lost. I sat there staring at the screen not believing what I had just watched.

That's the context. That's what February 4th carried into Dolphin Stadium with it.

Miami, Rain, and a Nightmare Start

It was raining in Miami. Not drizzling — raining. Humid, miserable, the kind of night where the field looks like a reflection of itself. Super Bowl XLI was played in conditions that should have favored a conservative, defensive team. Which was fine, except the Colts weren't that.

Then Devin Hester took the opening kickoff 92 yards to the house.

Bears 7, Colts 0. Peyton Manning had not touched the ball. Sixty thousand people in that stadium and every Colts fan watching from their couch had the exact same thought: here we go again.

I don't know how to explain what years of playoff loss does to you as a fan. You stop trusting good things. You start waiting for the other shoe because the other shoe always drops. Hester scoring before the offense even touched the field felt like a message from the universe. This wasn't the year either. Of course it wasn't.

And then something happened that hadn't happened before.

The team didn't panic.

The Drive That Changed Everything

Manning came out and started picking apart the Bears defense like it was a regular season game in September. Not frantic. Not trying to make up seven points in one throw. Methodical. Patient. The same quarterback who had been picked apart by Belichick's defense for years was just... executing. Completions. First downs. Clock moving. Like the score, the rain, the history — none of it registered.

By halftime the Colts were leading.

I still remember where I was sitting. I remember not letting myself feel good about it because feeling good about it had burned me before. You learn to hold it at arm's length, to not fully invest until there's no time left on the clock, because Colts football had made fools of optimists too many times.

The fourth quarter came. The lead held. The Bears couldn't do anything with it. The clock ran.

Final score: Colts 29, Bears 17.

What That Moment Was

Peyton Manning won Super Bowl MVP with 25 completions, 247 yards, and one touchdown. None of those numbers tell you anything. The number that mattered was the one on the clock when it hit zero.

For years — years — the story in the media was that Manning couldn't win the big one. I hated that narrative because I knew it was lazy. Football isn't tennis. You need your defense to show up. You need a bounce here or there. You need 53 other guys to be right on the night. But narratives don't care about nuance. They're not supposed to. And the only way to kill a narrative like that is to make it stop being true.

He made it stop being true.

Tony Dungy — one of the finest human beings to ever coach in the NFL — won his championship that night. The right person at the right time.

The Relief

I've thought about this a lot over the years. The dominant emotion I remember from that night wasn't joy. It was relief.

Joy comes when something good happens that you didn't necessarily expect. Relief comes when something finally happens that you needed to happen. When weight you've been carrying gets set down. When years of almost and not quite and not this time finally end.

That's what it felt like when the clock hit zero on Super Bowl XLI. Not celebration. Release.

The 2006 Colts weren't the most talented team Manning ever played on. They weren't the most dominant. But they were the one that made it to the end and didn't lose. On a rainy night in Miami, after years of January misery, that was everything.

I still have the jersey. I'll always have the jersey.

— AWK