CHICAGO — It wasn’t just the Chicago Bears who had a pattern this season.
The Rams had one too.
Whereas Chicago stacked storybook endings, the Rams failed to finish what they started with disturbing regularity.
Five losses. Five fizzles.
Remember the unsatisfying finale to “The Sopranos”? Swelling crescendo … then abrupt cut to black? That was the Rams. Out of gas. Out of answers.
Said defensive star Jared Verse: “All our losses were self-inflicted.”
Two weeks into the playoffs and the Rams have turned a corner. Suddenly, they close out games.
Sure, there were blemishes to their 20-17 overtime victory at Chicago on Sunday night, just as their three-point win at Carolina had its wild-card warts.
The point is, when the Rams needed to land the knockout blow, they delivered.
That’s just where they want to be heading into the NFC championship game at Seattle, where last month they frittered away a 16-point lead in the fourth quarter and wound up losing in overtime.
Seismologists are at the ready. That’s how loud Lumen Field will be. The ground might be shaking in Seattle, but the Rams won’t be.
“We don’t think about that last game too much,” Rams safety Kam Curl said. “[Seattle] got lucky and won it in the end. I feel like we’re the better team.”
He then conceded, “It’s going to be a dogfight.”
In football vernacular, Curl was a dawg Sunday night, coming up with a huge interception of Caleb Williams in overtime and setting up the winning field-goal drive.
That turned back the almost-supernatural heroics of the Bears, who won games with fourth-quarter comebacks seven times this season, more than any other team. And the touchdown by Williams at the end of regulation, when he dropped back from the 14 to the 40 — the forty! — and somehow found Cole Kmet in the end zone will live in Chicago sports lore.
Yet on a frigid night, in the swirling snow, these Rams told fate to take a hike.
Rams safety Quentin Lake said the down times this season, the frustration of losing those close games, “gave us the experience and confidence” to turn on the afterburners now.
“We know what it takes to not feel that feeling again,” he said. “The only team that’s beaten the Rams is the Rams, just put it like that.”
Among the cold and imposing bodies in Chicago on Sunday: Lake Michigan and Lake, Quentin.
In the fourth quarter, with the Bears two yards from scoring, Lake caught leaping running back D’Andre Swift in the air and planted him into the turf for no gain. It was a key play in a goal-line stand that stole all the oxygen from the crowd.
“I had to channel my inner Carnell Lake on that one,” he said of his father, the legendary UCLA and Pittsburgh Steelers defensive back.
That wasn’t the only channeling the Rams did. They converted a fourth and one in the fourth quarter by handing the ball to receiver Puka Nacua, a play reminiscent of a jet sweep to Cooper Kupp in a similar situation in the Super Bowl.
And their win at Chicago had the feel of their divisional win at Tampa Bay four years ago, when they went on to hoist the Lombardi Trophy. In that 30-27 victory over the Buccaneers, the Rams similarly responded to a gut punch near the end — a Tampa Bay touchdown to tie — then marched 62 yards in the final 42 seconds and won it with a field goal.
Like this season’s Rams, there were all sorts of red flags in the regular season for that team. Those Rams didn’t win a game in November, then got hot.
That path to the Super Bowl is woven into the tapestry of great moments in Los Angeles sports. The Rams beat the Buccaneers, then toppled San Francisco in the conference title game at SoFi Stadium before winning it all against Cincinnati on that same field.
Now, yet another showdown with a division rival for a trip to the Super Bowl.
Speaking of flashbacks, three of the four potential Super Bowl matchups are rematches: Rams-New England, Seattle-New England and Seattle-Denver.
There is a healthy amount of respect between the Rams and Seahawks, and — at least from the Rams in the locker room Sunday night — a feeling that this matchup was fated.
“Something about that moment when we lost that game [in Seattle] that I felt like we’ll be back here again,” defensive lineman Kobie Turner said. “And honestly, I wouldn’t want it any other way.”
So after dumping destiny on its head in Chicago, the Rams are cool with it again. They used to freeze under pressure. Sunday, somehow, they thawed.
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