Allen Lazard had everything in his hands – a chance to give the top-seeded Green Bay Packers a head start in their playoff games, a ticket to immortality in Titletown and for a fraction of the football – and then with a severe and sudden blow, everything falls on the frozen tundra.
With two steps from Darious Williams, corner catcher of the Los Angeles Rams, and straight ahead in the direction of Aaron Rodgers’ glorious pass action, Lazard stretched his white gloves 35 yards from the end zone and smiled as the ball fell from his fingertips.
So much for shutting down the sixth-seeded Rams’ hopes halfway through the third quarter. Three plays later, the Packers struck for the first time; seven minutes later, with 1:41 left in the third quarter, LA converted a trick-or-treating two-point conversion to pull up to seven points.
It was a nerve-wracking time at Lambeau Field, where 7,439 snow-dusted, socially distant supporters gathered Saturday to represent Packer supporters amid a global pandemic. Yet, even in his moment of apparent ominousness, Lazard could not have been cooler.
“I’m not really getting fassed about it,” Lazard told me in a telephone interview after the game. “Just because I know it’s going to be another drop, and I can just keep going. And I know I’ll pick up the play if the next opportunity presents itself.”
At that moment, in an area across the aisle from Packers’ cheerful dressing room, Lazard had the luxury of delivering these words with authority. After redeeming himself by playing the game, splitting some Rams defensive backs and picking up a 58-yard pass from Rodgers to place the final win of Green Bay’s 32-18 victory, the third-year receiver looks forward to the NFC Championship game on January 24 (against the winner of Sunday’s divisional game between the New Orleans Saints and Tampa Bay Buccaneers at Lambeau) – rather than looking back on an off-season with regret at the event held by his hands slipped.
It is not to be confused with The look, an expression of disgust from his demanding quarterback, who greeted Lazard when he returned to the turmoil.
“Oh, I like that glitter,” Nathaniel Hackett, the Packers’ attacking coordinator, later joked. “You did not live until you got it.”
Lazard got it and lived to fight another play.
“The communication in those cases is not really verbal,” Lazard said of Rodgers’ reaction to his decline in the third quarter. “It’s just a little more look. Of course we’re all on the same page. I want to catch the ball, and he wants me to catch the ball. I don’t think there necessarily has to be something for ‘Catch the Ball’ or “Do your job” or anything, because he knows I care … and people make mistakes, so you just have to keep going. “
For Rodgers, a 37-year-old superstar who risked his second Super Bowl series – and the first chance to start an NFC Championship game in the stadium he loved most – the game was clear. In a power play with fellow Cal alum, Jared Goff, who performed beautifully (21 for 27, 174 yards, one touch, no interception) in the aftermath of a thumb operation and helped give the Rams a chance give, Rodgers needed his teammates to include to ensure he gets the upper hand.