There were 42 seconds left when Jared Goff stood under center at the Detroit Lions’ 48-yard-line. It was first down.
All he had to do was find another 20 yards, set up a reasonable field goal chance, get the team out of Soldier Field with a win.
All that was at stake was nothing.
But also, everything.
Goff took the snap, dropped back and hit Amon-Ra St. Brown – who else? – on a crossing route 10 yards down the field. St. Brown, who’d tortured the Chicago Bears all day, stopped, spun back, and took off the other way.
Twenty-six yards later, the Bears finally corralled him.
The Lions ran down the clock, called a timeout with two seconds, ran out Jake Bates, kicked a field goal for a 19-16 win, got on a bus, then on a plane, and vowed how they were not
going to be in that position next year, missing the NFL playoffs and all.
Actually, the vow came before the plane.
“It’s frustrating,” coach Dan Campbell told reporters after the game, “... that’s not where we want to be. We have got to get in.”
On Sunday, Sept. 13, that quest starts, against the New Orleans Saints (1 p.m., Fox).
When the team runs out of the tunnel at Ford Field, no one will be thinking about that blustery day in Chicago, or the St. Brown 26-yard catch and run, or the Bates’ field goal as time expired, or that the win cemented an above-.500 record for the season.
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But the core of the team will feel its propulsion. As Goff told reporters after that game:
“It feels good to kind of get back to who we are and see it in live-speed reality.”
The Lions needed that win. Not for last season. But for the 2026 offseason. And this season, like how they needed the win at Green Bay at the end of the 2022 season, which propelled the Lions to the NFC title game run the next season.
The circumstances aren’t exactly the same.
The Saints are marching in
The 2022 Lions lost six of their first seven games before turning it around and ended with the statement win against the Packers to keep them out of the playoffs, too.
The 2025 Lions lost their three previous games before the season finale in Chicago.
They were reeling. Finished. A week removed from one of the ugliest losses of the Campbell-Brad Holmes era, when they got run over by a middling Minnesota team starting a third-string undrafted rookie quarterback.
Whereas beating the Packers put a stamp – and a statement – on a turnaround that began midway through the season, beating the Bears was more important internally, as Goff noted, they needed to see that they could still be who thought they were.
They needed to prove it, and they did, and now comes the chance to build on that proof. The schedule looks easier than it did a year ago, but then NFL teams can turn in a hurry. See: the Lions.
So don’t bank on an easy schedule. The Lions aren’t. Nor should they. Just listen to Campbell talk about the Saints earlier this week:
“There's a lot of young, hungry players, talented players. You could see their progression as the season went on last year towards the end of the year. They started playing pretty good football – minus Atlanta. But, that last game, the defense played really, really good.”
As for the second-year quarterback, Tyler Shough?
“There's a level of maturity,” Campbell said, “composure that you see that looks like that's here to stay. And they have got some potency.”
This isn’t coachspeak. This is realspeak, or Campbellspeak, as it should be known. Of course he thinks his team can win and probably should win. But narratives flip quickly, and his guys need to be ready and firing.
That didn’t happen consistently enough a year ago. Yes, injuries were an issue, and are always an issue, and have bitten the Lions more than most the past two seasons.
What went missing will be found
Yet injuries don’t account for the way they played in those losses to the Rams, the Steelers and the Vikings, especially those last two. The Lions lost their mojo and their identity, and the latter is what gutted their season.
Yes, losing center Frank Ragnow hurt, and losing the best version of Taylor Decker hurt – he struggled with a injured shoulder all season. Losing the safeties, the star tight end, the best version of Alim McNeill (he was playing with a surgically repaired ACL and didn’t have his usual explosiveness), the starting cornerbacks for a time, all of it mattered.
Still, there was something else missing, too, and Campbell tried to describe right after the Bears win:
“I still believe the nucleus of this team is right,” he said. “I really do. But we are going to need to make a few changes ... collectively. We’re going to have to work through some things to get the best version of ourselves.”
He and his staff spent the offseason working on that. Holmes spent the offseason refortifying the trenches.
The Lions won’t have their center, Cade Mays, until sometime in October, but once he comes back from a broken bone in his right wrist, the offensive line should be better than it was a year ago, and the defensive line, based on the preseason – yes, consider the context – looks deeper and fleeter.
If they are better in the trenches, and are better in the injury luck department, the Lions will have a chance to build on not only that identity-saving win against the Bears, but the foundation they laid the past half decade.
Campbell is right to believe in the core of this team. It’s full of difference makers and playmakers, and – as we saw in Chicago – when the playoffs were out of reach and they’d lost three in a row, it's full of winners.
It’s time to show that again.
I believe they will.
Contact Shawn Windsor: swindsor@freepress.com. Follow him @shawnwindsor.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Detroit Lions primed for another run – trace it back to beating Bears
