Champions: Green Bay Packers bring Lombardi Trophy back to Titletown
ARLINGTON, Texas — The Green Bay Packers
are world champions again.
.Champions! Champions! Champions! Champions! Champions!
The word won’t grow weary to the ears of thePackers and their fans, just as the sight of today’s Super Bowl XLV victory over the Pittsburgh Steelers here and the countless replays won’t disturb the eyes.
The Packers rule the country’s biggest sports stage.
Champions!
That’s 13 now, the most of any franchise in the history of professional football.
The evidence, laid before the nation at Cowboys Stadium, cannot be refuted.
The victory brought to a joyful conclusion an adventurous 2010 Packers season that moved between the valley and the mountaintop and finally, with resolve, was not denied the ultimate prize.
The Lombardi Trophy’s 14-year sabbatical from Wisconsin has ended, and Packers fans around the world are rejoicing.
Champions!
Packers fans passionately follow the team, but watching their favorite players win a title is a dream.
That dream seemed fantasy less than two months ago when the Packers stumbled against the Detroit Lions, lost valiantly to the New England Patriots and were left with only one option.
Win the rest of the games. All of them.
The Giants, the Bears, the Eagles, the Falcons, the Bears, and the Steelers.
It is an accomplishment that will find its deserving place in the team’s proud history, alongside Curly Lambeau’s direction of triple titles of 1929-31, the three-peat of Vince Lombardi’s 1965-67 teams, and the Mike Holmgren-led victory in Super Bowl XXXI at the end of the 1996 season.
This has been a story more than a year in the making since the football bounced away from Aaron Rodgers and gave the Arizona Cardinals that overtime playoff victory 13 months ago.
But Super Bowl was on the tongues of Packers fans even before the players put their pads on at training camp. The ebb and flow of the season challenged the optimism that was so vibrant in the summer, but the surge that began in December became an unstoppable force through Philadelphia, Atlanta, Chicago and Arlington.
The Packers and their fans won’t get tired of celebrating this one, and they won’t get tired of saying it.
Champions!
Tony Walter is a columnist for the Press-Gazette. He can be reached at (920) 431-8360 or attwalter@greenbaypressgazette.com
Tony Walter is a columnist for the Press-Gazette. He can be reached at (920) 431-8360 or attwalter@greenbaypressgazette.com