I’m fairly certain I have not seen this fact written anywhere, but here goes: Kansas City is the only city that has won championships in three of the five largest North American team pro sports leagues since 2013 (those five being NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB, and MLS). This is particularly impressive since Kansas City only has teams in three of those five leagues--every KC team has brought home a title within the last seven seasons. Even if you list total combined championships won by a city since 2013, KC looks impressive:
MOST COMBINED CHAMPIONSHIPS SINCE 2013 IN THE BIG 5 LEAGUES
Boston 4 (3 Patriots, 1 Red Sox)
Bay Area 4 (3 Warriors, 1 SF Giants)
KC 3 (1 Chiefs, 1 Royals, 1 Sporting)
Seattle 3 (2 Sounders, 1 Seahawks)
Chicago 3 (2 Blackhawks, 1 Cubs)
Or to come at it another way, all three of Kansas City’s teams have won a championship since the last time the greater New York City area got a title from any of its eleven total teams across the five leagues (the last one was the Giants’ Super Bowl win eight years ago). So the next time a New Yorker puffs their chest in your general direction about the bagel water, remind them that the Yankees suck (recently).
As recently as October of 2013, the Royals were a permanent farce, the Chiefs were a five-act tragedy, and Sporting was the team with a shiny new stadium where they had previously lost their biggest playoff games. And now we’re titletown, thanks to three crazy playoff runs, every single one of which involved bonkers comebacks from highly-likely defeat. It was the greatest decade in KC sports history. We were privileged to watch a team precisely engineered to be good every year (Sporting), a team that caught lightning in a bottle (the Royals), and a team that drafted the most talented player of his generation (the Chiefs). I can’t imagine we’ll see the likes of it again.
And so, while the giddiness is fresh, here is my celebration of my ten favorite moments from the playoff runs of Sporting in 2013, the Royals in 2015, and the Chiefs in 2019-20. I’m defining “moment” a touch loosely, but these are the ten that stick with me. It was not easy to narrow it down.
#10: Mahomes to Hill, 3rd and 15, 4th Quarter, Super Bowl
I’m grabbing this stat from ESPN, but it’s the craziest damn thing. On 3rd and 15 in the regular season and playoffs, Patrick Mahomes was 13 for 17 for 299 yards, 3 TD’s, and 0 INT’s. That’s an average of 17.6 yards per attempt. He averaged a first down completion on 3rd and 15. That shouldn’t be possible.
I’ll freely admit that around 9 minutes to go in the Super Bowl, I was approaching the acceptance phase. The 49ers were leveraging every obvious advantage they had, and KC had no answers. But all year, the Chiefs have converted crazy 3rd-and-longs, and on this one, with the season on the line, Mahomes took a shotgun snap and then dropped back an additional 8 yards (because why not make it 3rd and 28?) and then he threw the ball 60 yards downfield to a wide open Hill. It was still a 20-10 lead for San Francisco, but if you had watched KC all season you knew that for the first time all night the Chiefs looked like the Chiefs.
#9: Feilhaber steal and assist to Bieler, Extra Time, Eastern Conference Semifinals
Benny Feilhaber was exactly what Sporting Kansas City needed when they signed him in 2013. They had a good core, with Matt Besler, Graham Zusi, and CJ Sapong, among others, but they had a good core of Boy Scouts. They needed a magnificent bastard, and that bastard was Benny Feilhaber, the platonic form of the guy who sits in the high school parking lot in a sports car from his dad’s dealership, waiting to make a pass at your girlfriend. In this case, he stole a pass from the New England goalkeeper in the 113th minute of the second leg of a cup tie, and then fed a perfect pass to Claudio Bieler, who had his one great KC moment and scored a goal that broke a 3-3 aggregate draw and sent Sporting on to the Conference finals. I was there, I was freezing, I lost my shit.
#8: Colon drives in go-ahead run, 12th Inning, Game 5 of World Series
I’ve written about this one elsewhere. Suffice it to say that when the RBI that turns out to be the decisive run of a World Series is #8 on this list, it’s been a fun time to be a sports fan in KC.
#7: Cain scores from first on a single, 8th Inning, Game 6 of ALCS
This was an objectively huge run--it ended up being the pennant-winner against the Blue Jays--but the craziest thing about it is that Lorenzo Cain going first-to-home on a single was not a crazy decision. In fact, he made it by a mile. Cain running the bases was one of my favorite things to watch in KC sports this decade. He moved with remarkable grace for such a large man. As my own feet got progressively worse as the decade progressed (to the point where I eventually needed surgery) it was a joy to watch a runner who seemed to be able to fly.
#6: Williams’ clinching TD run, 4th Quarter, Super Bowl
Speaking of my post-surgical feet, I was somewhat surprised by how rapidly I moved after Damien Williams ran 38 yards to put the Chiefs ahead 31-20 late in the Super Bowl. I vaguely recall that, after Williams scored, I said something about needing to “take it to the streets” and I grabbed my cousin’s Chiefs flag and shot out to door to run around for a while while the people up the block set off fireworks (my cousin soon followed behind me with his much larger house flag). It was the fastest I’ve moved in quite a while. I felt it a bit the next day, but still, it was lovely.
#5: Sinovic’s game-tying goal, 2nd Half, Eastern Conference Semifinals
What’s more exciting as a fan: the score that breaks a tie to put your team in the lead, or the score that brings your team back to life after a period of near-certain doom? I would submit that it is the latter (indeed, the rest of these rankings exemplify that belief). Heading into November 6, 2013, Sporting was developing a reputation as a team that choked. Each of the past two seasons, they had lost to lower seeds in the playoffs, and they had lost their first match of the 2013 playoffs 2-1 in New England. They had one more game against New England back in KC, but very late in the match, Sporting was trailing 3-2 on aggregate goals.
And then, local boy Seth Sinovic, a professional athlete who is so Kansas City that his aunt lives across the street from me, a defensive player who is one of the worst shooters I’ve ever seen, cracked an absolute laser beam on a loose ball to save Sporting from impending elimination. Going into that match, I genuinely did not believe that good things could happen in the playoffs to Kansas City teams. That narrative started to change at exactly 78:02 in the second leg of the conference semis, when a kid from Rockhurst made the shot of his life.
#4: Mahomes’ Mad Dash, 2nd Quarter, AFC Divisional Playoffs
Assuming that we don’t all burn up or drown before then, sometime around the turn of the 22nd century an old man will be sitting in a Kansas City nursing home rambling on to his reluctantly-visiting great-grandchildren about how back when he was in elementary school he saw Patrick Mahomes play in the Super Bowl, and these whippersnappers you see on the field today aren’t half as good as ol’ Patrick Mahomes. Ol’ Mahomes could throw it without looking; he could sling it with both hands; he could stare down a grizzly bear and not rattle even a little. Hell, he could run through a whole damn defense if he set his mind to it.
The great-grandkids will roll their eyes and check their watches (which will be inside their brains, because it’ll be the future) to see how much longer they need to wait before they can leave without being rude. They won’t have any idea that great-grandad is absolutely right.
#3: Gordon’s game-tying HR, 9th Inning, Game 1 of the World Series
I once saw a young Alex Gordon hit a home run in the minors against the AA Springfield Cardinals. Based on a bit of box score perusal, I’m pretty sure it was in 2006, though he hit a couple in Springfield that year, so I can’t pin down the date. Gordon hit it a long way, too--it landed on top of that building out past the right field fence.
It was a fun moment, inasmuch as I got to stand up and cheer in front of the Cardinal fans, but we all knew what the deal was: they rooted for the team that won championships, and I rooted for the team that occasionally had a prospect who was decent enough that the Royals could develop him and then give him away for pennies on the dollar before he hit free agency.
Instead, Gordon made a career of it with the Royals, and nine years later, with his team trailing in the bottom of the ninth of Game One of the World Series, he hit it even farther than he did on that night in Springfield. The Royals were about to go down 1-0 and lose home field advantage; instead, KC rallied to win, and they set up a rent-free residence inside the Mets’ heads that would continue through late innings for the rest of the series.
#2: Palmer’s missed PK, Penalty Shootout, MLS Cup Final
While the Royals and Chiefs both won their championships in very exciting games (12 innings; fourth-quarter comeback), the actual championship-concluding play was not especially tense (strike out the side with five run lead; throw an incomplete pass to run out the clock).
For Sporting, though, it was tense right down to the end. And beyond the end. And even beyond the reasonable end of the tiebreaker penalty shootout. The shootout is supposed to take five kicks per team, but KC and Salt Lake needed ten to decide a winner (it’s still the longest championship game in MLS history).
There’s a case to be made that I should pick other moments from the MLS Cup Final--Collin’s game-tying goal in the 76th minute; Nielsen’s do-or-die save of Salt Lake’s 8th penalty--but I’ve never experienced anything in sports quite like the millisecond shift between wondering if this tie will ever be broken to realizing that it’s over, and KC has a champion, and that sitting out in the 25-degree weather for three hours was worth it after all. If all the beer hadn’t been frozen, I might have thrown it in the air to celebrate.
#1: Hosmer’s Mad Dash, 9th Inning, Game 5 of World Series
If anything defines KC sports in the 2010’s, it’s irrational confidence being rewarded. Renaming your soccer team after a club from Portugal and then hoping that people in the midwest are gonna buy into it still seems like a crazy idea almost ten years after it worked. The Chiefs, an organization long synonymous with choking, hired a coach long synonymous with choking, and then went all-in on a raw QB prospect who went 5-7 in his last season in college. And Eric Hosmer, who is not a notably fast man, decided that the ninth inning of a World Series game would be a great time to see if he could score from third on a delayed break on a groundout.
I’m sure everyone thought that the first person to eat a burnt end was crazy too.
Anyway, Hosmer scored. There was much rejoicing. It was my favorite unbelievable sports moment of a decade I still can’t quite believe happened.
Honorable Mentions: Dwyer’s goal in Eastern Conference Final; Collin’s MLS Cup goal; Davis’ Game 6 ALCS relief pitching appearance; Correa’s error in 8th inning of Game 4 of the ALDS; Mahomes’ TD pass to Watkins in 4th quarter of AFC title game; Mahomes’ 1st down pass to Watkins in 4th quarter of Super Bowl; Fuller’s interception in 4th quarter of Super Bowl
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