Appreciating a remarkable, pivotal year in Kansas City sports and what it portends

Ten years ago next week, Andy Reid’s Philadelphia Eagles lost for the 11th time in 12 games to end the 2012 season. After 14 years in Philly that included a Super Bowl berth, Reid was out on New Year’s Eve.

That very day, the Chiefs fired Romeo Crennel after a 2-14 season that punctuated the ongoing modern futility of a franchise that hadn’t won a postseason game since the 1993 season.

In a matter of days, Chiefs chairman and CEO Clark Hunt would come to consider Reid the “ideal candidate” in numerous ways.

“When we parted ways there, I felt it was good for the Eagles organization and I felt it had a chance to be good for me whatever direction it was going to go …,” Reid said Thursday. “Sometimes change can be good. And at that particular time, it was needed.”

All of that engaged the harmonic convergence that propelled the Chiefs out of a vicious cycle into what Hunt has called a “virtuous circle” — defined by Merriam-Webster.com as “a chain of events in which one desirable occurrence leads to another (that) further promotes the first occurrence and so on resulting in a continuous process of improvement.”

Stoked by the emergence of the phenomenon that is Patrick Mahomes (not to mention the fascinating composer-performer dynamic between Mahomes and Reid), Reid has guided the Chiefs to more playoff wins (nine) than they’d had in their entire previous history (eight), seven straight AFC West titles, four straight AFC Championship games, their first Super Bowl in half a century … and a fine chance now at their third Super Bowl appearance in four years.

It says something about how all of this begins to get taken for granted that much of the recent chatter about an 11-3 team entering its game against Seattle (7-7) on Saturday at GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium has been grumbling about perceived flaws or that the Chiefs haven’t been winning by enough.

For our part, we’ve felt the need to nitpick about the implications of their inability to summarily dispense with lesser foes.

The spirit of the holiday season compels reflection, gratitude and perspective, though.

And if you step back, you might realize these are the glory days in real time.

Not only for a Chiefs team guided by the fifth-winningest coach in NFL history but for the entire Kansas City sports scene.

Not just because of all that happened in a captivating year like no other around here, a year of astounding developments that few could have anticipated would ever arrive, but for all that this year portends.

That extends well beyond the Chiefs’ perpetual contention for a title under Reid and with Mahomes, the mesmerizing spectacle we are privileged to witness week-in and week-out and who has come to stand for Kansas City around the world: from Italy to Nigeria, for example, and from Iran to Qatar.

Speaking of Qatar, the culmination of the World Cup there last week also signified a commencement toward 2026 and Kansas City’s rare place on the world stage (with unprecedented crowds here) as one of 16 North American host cities.

Making for a fine intermediate step, Kansas City will host the 2023 NFL Draft April 27-29 … mere weeks after the anticipated opening of the new airport in March.

“We’re preparing to host the largest event in our city’s history,” Kathy Nelson, president of the Kansas City Sports Commission and Visit KC, told The Star in a recent interview. “And then three years later we’ll be hosting the largest event in the history of the world.”

Along with the still-unclear number of games that will be held at Arrowhead, the city in 2026 will be the site of weeks of international fan fests for tens of thousands (either at Union Station and/or the south lawn of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art).

With our multitude of outstanding facilities thanks to Sporting KC and the KC Current, the area also will be a coveted training center and serve as a base camp for one or more national team entourages and their fans.

The estimated economic impact is in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and images of Kansas City will be transmitted around the globe.

Between that result and the countless hours they invested in the bid the last few years, no wonder Nelson and KC2026 World Cup bid director Katherine Holland instantly hugged and cried at No Other Pub when the announcement was made in June.

Also hugging in the moment were Hunt and Cliff Illig, principal owner of the Sporting KC franchise that has done so much to burnish Kansas City’s reputation as a soccer city. Neither typically shows a lot of emotion, Chiefs president Mark Donovan said then. This time, though …

“It was like two kids on Christmas morning,” Donovan added. “It was fun to watch. Because it was true, sheer joy.”

You want more true, sheer joy to celebrate from this year?

Consider the intrepid journey of the Current, which went from last place in the National Women’s Soccer League in its first season to the championship match this season as co-owners Angie and Chris Long and Brittany Mahomes continued to audaciously break barriers.

Coinciding with the 50th anniversary of Title IX this year, they completed a $19 million training facility in Riverside and broke ground on a $117-million, 11,500-seat stadium on the Missouri River at the Berkley Riverfront that is expected to open in 2024.

The stadium and its ancillary elements will feature other sporting events, concerts and frequent entertainment possibilities in an outdoor pavilion area. But most of all, it stands for a groundbreaking commitment to women’s sports:

The stadium is the first of its kind built exclusively for a NWSL franchise and will be exceedingly rare, if not unique, for any women’s professional team anywhere.

Also potentially transformative is the Royals stated intention to move from the Truman Sports Complex to a downtown location into a ballpark district that team chairman and CEO John Sherman envisions as a $2 billion public-private partnership.

We’re intrigued about the possibilities, especially since Sherman last week said that the estimated $1 billion for development around the stadium would be privately funded. And so would “a major part of the ballpark” itself.

And we also believe that Sherman’s history of philanthropy and deeply civic-minded activity mean he’s sincere about this being more about catalyzing the growth of the city than having a glitzy new ballpark.

But even as some aspects of this are being shaded in, so much remains to be clarified (including location and more specifics about funding) that it makes it impossible to endorse anything beyond just trying to keep an open mind.

Moreover, the more pressing concern for any Royals fan right now is not when the team might move but when it might be competitive again.

The latest miserable season (65-97) led to the firing of manager Mike Matheny and a front-office shakeup with the dismissal of Dayton Moore, the franchise’s most visible and influential voice for 16 years.

Even as he was making the change, Sherman noted that Moore had “resurrected” the franchise and pointed to the enchanted 2014 and 2015 seasons that Moore engineered.

One day Moore’s career here should be commemorated in the Royals Hall of Fame.

Not only for putting together back-to-back American League pennant winners (and the 2015 World Series championship) for a small-market franchise but also for delivering something that was in short supply around then on the Kansas City sports scene: hope.

At the time of those runs underscored by comebacks for the ages, the Royals hadn’t made it to the postseason since 1985 and the Chiefs still were decades removed from their last playoff victory.

Long before Shawnee Mission West grad Jason Sudeikis’ “Ted Lasso” made “Believe” a popular one-word mantra, those Royals teams made it, well, a belief system. Not just in their clubhouse but around here.

Clinging to that, against whatever odds, was part of what we were reminded of in other ways during this momentous year.

So Kansas, with no top-20 recruits out of high school, won the national title with what coach Bill Self called “the epitome of a team.” KU is back in the top 10, while Mizzou and K-State are off to strong starts with new coaches Dennis Gates and Jerome Tang, respectively.

Under second-year coach Lance Leipold, a KU football program that had won five games in three years uncorked a 5-0 start and will play in a bowl for the first time in 14 years when it meets Arkansas next week in the Liberty Bowl.

Then there was Kansas State, which won the Big 12 title and earned a Sugar Bowl matchup with Alabama after being projected fifth in the conference before the season.

With Mizzou meeting Wake Forest in the Gasparilla Bowl, all three local FBS programs qualified for bowls for just the second time and first since 2003.

But if you really want to point to something absolutely against the odds and “true, sheer joy” and about everything we might hope for from sports, Buck O’Neil in July at long last entered the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.

For all the tears and heartbreak of the snub of 2006, irrepressible Negro Leagues Baseball Museum president Bob Kendrick would come to feel “the stars have kind of aligned” for it to happen in 2022 as the museum looks to the future.

The bittersweet part, of course, is that Buck wasn’t here to enjoy it.

For that matter, it’s a shame that Lamar Hunt isn’t alive to bask in a local World Cup that is part of his legacy on so many levels.

And it’s tragic that Shawnee Mission East’s Grant Wahl, the renowned soccer writer who died at age 49 in Qatar, won’t be here for a singular event in the history of the city after all his work spreading the gospel of the game.

Indeed, this also was a year of loss that included the likes of Walt Corey, John Hadl, Ed Lothamer, Jim Lynch and legendary high school coaches Terry English and Dick Purdy.

And part of the Mount Rushmore of Kansas City sports history, Len Dawson, whose rich life and story was about so many things.

One of the most under-appreciated aspects was how improbable his career in Kansas City was.

Not just because he joined the Chiefs in 1962 when they still were the Dallas Texans but because at that point of his career he was 27 after languishing through five NFL seasons.

Had Hank Stram not been an assistant coach at Purdue when Dawson played there, chances are Dawson’s career would have fizzled out before it ever really started.

Instead, Dawson led the Chiefs to two of the first four Super Bowls, including the 23-7 clobbering of Minnesota in Super Bowl IV.

Among the pallbearers at Dawson’s funeral were fellow Pro Football Hall of Famers Bobby Bell, Willie Lanier and Jan Stenerud as well as Chiefs Hall of Famers Ed Budde and Mike Garrett.

Their presence reverberated both as testament to the enduring power of that era but also to how fleeting and fickle fortune can be as time inevitably churns on.

It would be 50 years, after all, until the Chiefs returned to a Super Bowl … and this fresh sense of abundant promise that will never end.

All of which makes this a good time to step back and cherish this moment in time made possible only by so many unique forces.