That the Lions ended up in an overtime duel with the Rams on Sunday night was bad news for Detroit, given that they'd enjoyed a second-half lead of 17-3. But after the dust cleared on the home team's one and only drive in the extra period, I—Lions freak—found myself almost grateful for L.A.'s Matt Stafford–orchestrated comeback. Without it, I wouldn't have gotten to enjoy David Montgomery shoving the ball down the defense's throat with an assured dominance that not long ago would've felt foreign in this city.
Touching the ball five times on eight plays while gaining 45 of Detroit's 70 yards, the elder half of the Lions' running-back tandem trampled a spent defense. He crossed midfield through a wide-open lane at the line of scrimmage, avoided a cluster of would-be tacklers for a nine-yard gain to get into field-goal range, charged forward and carried some guys with him through the red zone, then capped the night with a punch-in TD. It was the penultimate run on third-and-1, with Montgomery obscured by a cloud of large men that just kept drifting left, that felt almost like an assurance to the crowd that everything had always been under control.
This was Dan Campbell GRIT—not a catchphrase on a T-shirt, but a physical kind of football the Lions are historically accustomed to watching with their backs on the turf. Montgomery ran like someone impatient to seal the game without any shenanigans or defensive challenges, because he was.
“I’ll be honest, I hate overtime,” he said in the postgame. “It’s a late game, I want to see my son. But we got there."
A pretty rocky Week 1 for the Lions, in which they needed to run a two-minute drill for a field goal to escape a familiar-feeling regulation collapse, thus ended in victory and renewed confidence for this team. It's going to be a weird season. This time last year, I was absolutely freaking out that they had somehow managed to put one over on Kansas City in the NFL's curtain-raiser. In 2024, however, an opening-night win was the expectation; ending the season on a win in February is the extremely dangerous hope.
I was back in Michigan over Labor Day, and the sentiment there is torn between excitement and a traumatized nervousness about feeling that excitement. Everyone in the state was raised with the belief that the Lions will let them down. It feels downright blasphemous to expect anything good. The second half of Sunday's game, if the untested Jake Bates had botched a kick or if the defense hadn't forced Stafford off the field near the end or if Jared Goff had thrown another pick, would have made sense to Lions fans. We've seen it, in every form imaginable. But now we're seeing something better.
