Culture
Chiefs defeat 49ers in OT of Super Bowl to cement dynasty status
LAS VEGAS — The NFL has a repeat champion for the first time in 19 years. The Kansas City Chiefs, with a third Super Bowl triumph in five seasons, cemented their status as the league’s modern-day dynasty with a 25-22 overtime win against the San Francisco 49ers on Sunday at Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas.
This one, the same as the last two for Kansas City and its superstar quarterback Patrick Mahomes, came with a stirring second-half comeback — and, this time, with some overtime heroics.
Jake Moody’s 27-yard field goal on the first possession of overtime put the 49ers ahead 22-19, but the Chiefs responded with a 13-play, 75-yard drive and won it on a 3-yard touchdown pass from Mahomes to Mecole Hardman.
It was but the latest must-have drive for Kansas City, a team that has built a reputation behind Mahomes as most dangerous when holding the ball last. The Chiefs trailed 19-16 with less than two minutes left in the fourth quarter when they marched 75 yards in 11 plays and Harrison Butker kicked a 29-yard field goal. The key play on the drive came on a third-and-7 with 16 seconds left, when Mahomes hit Travis Kelce on a crosser for a 22-yard gain that set the Chiefs up for the easy kick.
It’s the fourth Super Bowl win for the Chiefs franchise and the third for the team under coach Andy Reid, who joins Bill Walsh and Joe Gibbs in a tie for third-most all-time. Only Bill Belichick (six) and Chuck Noll (four) have more.
“The number three is a big number in terms of dynasties,” Kelce said this week, adding that he wanted to win this Super Bowl more than any of the previous three he’d played in. Winning three titles in a five-year window puts the Chiefs in a different conversation, one that includes some of the greatest runs in league history.
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Mahomes earned his third Super Bowl MVP going 34-of-46 passing for 333 yards, two touchdowns and one interception, resulting in a 99.3 passer rating. He joins Tom Brady (five) and Joe Montana (three) as the only players to win three Super Bowl MVP awards.
The championship also elevates Mahomes — a remarkable 15-3 in the playoffs in his six-year career — into elite company: he’s now one of five quarterbacks in league history to win at least three Super Bowls, joining Brady (seven), Montana (four), Terry Bradshaw (four) and Troy Aikman (three). Brady, Aikman and Mahomes, 28, are the only ones to win three before their 30th birthdays. Across the last two postseasons, Mahomes has gone 7-0, throwing 13 touchdowns and just one interception.
When CBS announcer Jim Nantz mentioned on the postgame podium how the Chiefs were underdogs in the last three games of this postseason, Mahomes said, “Just know that the Kansas City Chiefs are never underdogs. Just know that.”
Kelce added: “We couldn’t have gotten here without having that target on our back all year. Now we got a chance to do it three times in a row.”
It’s a devastating defeat for the 49ers, particularly coach Kyle Shanahan, who adds another chapter of Super Bowl heartache to what’s otherwise been a stellar career. As Atlanta’s offensive coordinator in 2017, Shanahan was on the wrong side of the biggest blown lead in Super Bowl history, when the Patriots rallied from a 28-3 third-quarter deficit to stun the Falcons in the only other championship game to go to overtime. Sunday’s loss is Shanahan’s second as a head coach in the Super Bowl; four years ago, the 49ers blew a 10-point fourth-quarter lead to the Chiefs in Super Bowl LIV, eventually losing 31-20.
San Francisco’s championship drought is now at 29 seasons. After winning five Lombardi Trophies within a 13-year window from 1982 to 1995, the 49ers have lost in all three of their trips to the Super Bowl since (after the 2012, 2019 and 2023 seasons).
Before this year’s Chiefs, the last Super Bowl champion to successfully defend its title was the 2004 Patriots. What had become routine in the first few decades of the Super Bowl era — there were eight repeat winners across the first 39 editions of the game — became nonexistent, a byproduct of increased parity across the league and an indication of just how taxing Super Bowl runs can.
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The title caps a stunning late-season surge from Kansas City, which slogged through its worst regular season since Mahomes became the starter in 2018. Plagued by an uncharacteristically inconsistent offense, including a league-worst 44 drops by its receivers, the Chiefs were just 9-6 after a loss to the Raiders at home on Christmas Day. It looked dire enough that Kansas City general manager Brett Veach was left wondering if his team would even make the postseason.
“You see it every year,” Veach said this week, “a team gets off to a hot start and doesn’t make the playoffs.”
But the Chiefs wouldn’t lose again all year, finishing the regular season with a pair of victories before ripping off four straight wins in the playoffs. What started in frigid temperatures in Kansas City, a wild-card win over the Dolphins in the fourth-coldest game in NFL history, continued with two gutsy road wins in Buffalo and Baltimore — the first true road wins of Mahomes’ playoff career — and culminated with Sunday’s comeback in Las Vegas.
It’s the most improbable title of the Chiefs’ current run, not simply due to their regular season struggles but because of the intense spotlight that’s trailed the team for most of the year. Kelce’s relationship with pop superstar Taylor Swift became its own phenomenon, and her appearances at games during the regular season and playoffs — she made it to all four during Kansas City’s postseason run, including Sunday’s Super Bowl after a Saturday show in Tokyo — became one of the biggest stories in sports.
Asked what he’s learned about the crush of celebrity over the past few months, Kelce smiled and offered this in the week leading up to the game: “That being famous worldwide is a lot different than being famous in Kansas City.”
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On Sunday, the 49ers controlled the first half by owning the trenches, particularly when the Chiefs had the ball. San Francisco’s punishing defensive line constantly had Mahomes scrambling from the pocket, sacking him twice and regularly forcing hurried throws. In turn, the Chiefs’ offense never got in sync, managing just a late field goal to cut into San Francisco’s 10-0 lead.
The Chiefs finished with just 16 first-quarter yards — compared with 125 for San Francisco — and couldn’t get Kelce involved. Kelce caught an early bubble screen for one yard, his only target over the first 30 minutes of the game.
After kicker Moody drilled what was then the longest field goal in Super Bowl history — a 55-yarder in the first quarter — the 49ers scored the game’s first touchdown with 4:23 left in the second quarter when wideout Jauan Jennings, off a pitch from Purdy, hit McCaffrey for a 21-yard catch-and-run score. It was a gutsy and creative play call from Shanahan and the first touchdown pass of Jennings’ three-year career.
San Francisco led 10-3 at the break and had Kansas City frustrated. CBS cameras caught Kelce bumping into Reid on the sideline during a tense exchange.
Their chances didn’t look any more promising after the opening drive of the third quarter when Mahomes threw his first interception of the last two postseasons.
But the game swung after a critical 49ers’ mistake in the third quarter when returner Darrell Luter Jr. fumbled a punt on San Francisco’s 35-yard line. The Chiefs’ Jaylen Watson recovered, and it took Mahomes all of one play to capitalize: he hit receiver Marquez Valdes-Scantling for a 16-yard touchdown a moment later.
Suddenly, after being outplayed all game long, the Chiefs were in front. History was repeating itself.
Jennings caught the 49ers’ second touchdown of the night with 11:22 early in the fourth quarter, but after a blocked extra point, the Chiefs were able to tie the game on an ensuing field goal that capped a 12-play, 69-yard drive, before winning it in overtime.
Chiefs owner Clark Hunt said during the Lombardi Trophy presentation, “One of the most thrilling Super Bowls I’ve ever seen.”
Required reading
(Photo: Harry How / Getty Images)
Whatever you do, don’t think of a bird.
Now: What kind of bird are you not thinking about? A pigeon? A bald eagle? Something more poetic, like a skylark or a nightingale? In any case, would you say that this bird you aren’t thinking about is real?
Before you answer, read this poem, which is quite literally about not thinking of a bird.
Human consciousness is full of riddles. Neuroscientists, philosophers and dorm-room stoners argue continually about what it is and whether it even exists. For Wallace Stevens, the experience of having a mind was a perpetual source of wonder, puzzlement and delight — perfectly ordinary and utterly transcendent at the same time. He explored the mysteries and pleasures of consciousness in countless poems over the course of his long poetic career. It was arguably his great theme.
Stevens was born in 1879 and published his first book, “Harmonium,” in 1923, making him something of a late bloomer among American modernists. For much of his adult life, he worked as an executive for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, rising to the rank of vice president. He viewed insurance less as a day job to support his poetry than as a parallel vocation. He pursued both activities with quiet diligence, spending his days at the office and composing poems in his head as he walked to and from work.
As a young man, Stevens dreamed of traveling to Europe, though he never crossed the Atlantic. In middle age he made regular trips to Florida, and his poems are frequently infused with ideas of Paris and Rome and memories of Key West. Others partake of the stringent beauty of New England. But the landscapes he explores, wintry or tropical, provincial or cosmopolitan, are above all mental landscapes, created by and in the imagination.
Are those worlds real?
Let’s return to the palm tree and its avian inhabitant, in that tranquil Key West sunset of the mind.
Until then, we find consolation in fangles.
When the director Rob Reiner cast his leads in the 1986 film “Stand by Me,” he looked for young actors who were as close as possible to the personalities of the four children they’d be playing. There was the wise beyond his years kid from a rough family (River Phoenix), the slightly dim worrywart (Jerry O’Connell), the cutup with a temper (Corey Feldman) and the sensitive, bookish boy.
Wil Wheaton was perfect for that last one, Gordie Lachance, a doe-eyed child who is ignored by his family in favor of his late older brother. Now, 40 years later, he’s traveling the country to attend anniversary screenings of the film, alongside O’Connell and Feldman, which has thrown him back into the turmoil that he felt as an adolescent.
Wheaton has channeled those emotions and his on-set memories into his latest project: narrating a new audiobook version of “The Body,” the 1982 Stephen King novella on which the film was based.
A few years ago, Wheaton started to float the idea of returning to the story that gave him his big break — that of a quartet of boys in 1959 Oregon, in their last days before high school, setting out to find a classmate’s dead body. “I’ve been telling the story of ‘Stand By Me’ since I was 12 years old,” he said.
But this time was different. Wheaton, who has narrated dozens of audiobooks, including Andy Weir’s “The Martian” and Ernest Cline’s “Ready Player One,” says he has come to enjoy narration more than screen acting. “I’m safe, I’m in the booth, nobody’s looking at me and I can just tell you a story.”
The fact that he, an older man looking back on his younger years, is narrating a story about an older man looking back on his younger years, is not lost on Wheaton. King’s original story is bathed in nostalgia. Coming to terms with death and loss is one of its primary themes.
Two days after appearing on stage at the Academy Awards as part of a tribute to Reiner — who was murdered in 2025 alongside his wife, Michele — Wheaton got on the phone to talk about recording the audiobook, reliving his favorite scenes from the film and reexamining a quintessential story of childhood loss through the lens of his own.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
“I felt really close to him, and my memory of him.”
Wheaton on channeling a co-star’s performance.
There’s this wonderful scene in “Stand By Me.” Gordie and Chris are walking down the tracks talking about junior high. Chris is telling Gordie, “I wish to hell I was your dad, because I care about you, and he obviously doesn’t.”
It’s just so honest and direct, in a way that kids talk to each other that adults don’t. And I think that one of the reasons that really sticks with people, and that piece really lands on a lot of audiences, and has for 40 years, is, just too many people have been Gordie in that scene.
That scene is virtually word for word taken from the text of the book. And when I was narrating that, I made a deliberate choice to do my best to recreate what River did in that scene.
“You’re just a kid,
Gordie–”
“I wish to fuck
I was your father!”
he said angrily.
“You wouldn’t go around
talking about takin those stupid shop courses if I was!
It’s like
God gave you something,
all those stories
you can make up, and He said:
This is what we got for you, kid.
Try not to lose it.
But kids lose everything
unless somebody looks out for them and if your folks
are too fucked up to do it
then maybe I ought to.”
I watched that scene a couple of times because I really wanted — I don’t know why it was so important to me to — well, I know: because I loved him, and I miss him. And I wanted to bring him into this as best as I could, right?
So I was reading that scene, and the words are identical to the script. And I had this very powerful flashback to being on the train tracks that day in Cottage Grove, Oregon. And I could see River standing next to them. They’re shooting my side of the scene and there’s River, right next to the camera, doing his off-camera dialogue, and there’s the sound guy, and there’s the boom operator. There’s my key light.
I could hear and feel it. It was the weirdest thing. It’s like I was right back there.
I was able to really take in the emotional memory of being Gordie in all of those scenes. So when I was narrating him and I’m me and I’m old with all of this experience, I just drew on what I remembered from being that little boy and what I remember of those friendships and what they meant to me and what they mean to me today.
“Rob gave me a gift. Rob gave me a career.”
Wheaton recalls the “Stand By Me” director’s way with kids on set, as well as his recent Oscars tribute.
Rob really encouraged us to be kids.
Jerry tells the most amazing story about that scene, where we were all sitting around, and doing our bit, and he improvised. He was just goofing around — we were just playing — and he said something about spitting water at the fat kid.
We get to the end of the scene, and he hears Rob. Rob comes around from behind the thing, and he goes, “Jerry!” And Jerry thinks, “Oh no, I’m in trouble. I’m in trouble because I improvised, and I’m not supposed to improvise.”
The context for Jerry is that he had been told by the adults in his life, “Sit on your hands and shut up. Stop trying to be a cutup. Stop trying to be funny. Stop disrupting people. Just be quiet.” And Jerry thinks, “Oh my God. I didn’t shut up. I’m in trouble. I’m gonna get fired.”
Rob leans in to all of us, and Rob says, “Hey, guys, do you see that? More of that. Do that!”
The whole time when you’re a kid actor, you’re just around all these adults who are constantly telling you to grow up. They’re mad that you’re being a kid. Rob just created an environment where not only was it supported that we would be kids — and have fun, and follow those kid instincts and do what was natural — it was expected. It was encouraged. We were supposed to do it.
They chanted together:
“I don’t shut up,
I grow up.
And when I look at you I throw up.”
“Then your mother goes around the corner
and licks it up,”
I said, and hauled ass out of there,
giving them the finger over my shoulder as I went.
I never had any friends later on
like the ones I had when I was twelve.
Jesus, did you?
When we were at the Oscars, I looked at Jerry. And we looked at this remarkable assemblage of the most amazingly talented, beautiful artists and storytellers. We looked around, and Jerry leans down, and he said, “We all got our start with Rob Reiner. He trusted every single one of us.”
And to stand there for him, when I really thought that I would be standing with him to talk about this stuff — it was a lot.
“I was really really really excited — like jumping up and down.”
The scene Wheaton was most looking forward to narrating: the tale of Lard Ass Hogan.
I was so excited to narrate it. It’s a great story! It’s a funny story. It’s such a lovely break — it’s an emotional and tonal shift from what’s happening in the movie.
I know this as a writer: You work to increase and release tension throughout a narrative, and Stephen King uses humor really effectively to release that tension. But it also raises the stakes, because we have these moments of joy and these moments of things being very silly in the midst of a lot of intensity.
That’s why the story of Lard Ass Hogan is so fun for me to tell. Because in the middle of that, we stop to do something that’s very, very fun, and very silly and very celebratory.
“Will you shut up and let him tell it?”
Teddy hollered.
Vern blinked.
“Sure. Yeah.
Okay.”
“Go on, Gordie,”
Chris said. “It’s not really much—”
“Naw,
we don’t expect much from a wet end like you,”
Teddy said,
“but tell it anyway.”
I cleared my throat. “So anyway.
It’s Pioneer Days,
and on the last night
they have these three big events.
There’s an egg-roll for the little kids and a sack-race for kids that are like eight or nine,
and then there’s the pie-eating contest.
And the main guy of the story
is this fat kid nobody likes
named Davie Hogan.”
When I narrate this story — whenever there is a moment of levity or humor, whenever there are those brief little moments that are the seasoning of the meal that makes it all so real and relatable — yes, it was very important to me to capture those moments.
I’m shifting in my chair, so I can feel each of those characters. It’s something that doesn’t exist in live action. It doesn’t exist in any other media.
“I feel the loss.”
Wheaton remembers River Phoenix.
The novella “The Body” is very much about Gordie remembering Chris. It’s darker, and it’s more painful, than the movie is.
I’ve been watching the movie on this tour and seeing River a lot. I remember him as a 14- and 15-year-old kid who just seemed so much older, and so much more experienced and so much wiser than me, and I’m only a year younger than him.
What hurts me now, and what I really felt when I was narrating this, is knowing what River was going through then. We didn’t know. I still don’t know the extent of how he was mistreated, but I know that he was. I know that adults failed him. That he should have been protected in every way that matters. And he just wasn’t.
And I, like Gordie, remember a boy who was loving. So loving, and generous and cared deeply about everyone around him, all the time. Who deserved to live a full life. Who had so much to offer the world. And it’s so unfair that he’s gone and taken from us. I had to go through a decades-long grieving process to come to terms with him dying.
Near the end
of 1971,
Chris
went into a Chicken Delight in Portland
to get a three-piece Snack Bucket.
Just ahead of him,
two men started arguing
about which one had been first in line. One of them pulled a knife.
Chris,
who had always been the best of us
at making peace,
stepped between them and was stabbed in the throat.
The man with the knife had spent time in four different institutions;
he had been released from Shawshank State Prison
only the week before.
Chris died almost instantly.
It is a privilege that I was allowed to tell this story. I get to tell Gordie Lachance’s story as originally imagined by Stephen King, with all of the experience of having lived my whole adult life with the memory of spending three months in Gordie Lachance’s skin.
Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about printed works that have gone on to find new life as movies, television shows, theatrical productions and more. This week’s challenge highlights offbeat television shows that began as comic books. Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the comics and their screen versions.
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