KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- If you are a Chiefs fan, you might not want to know what Charvarius Ward is going to say about the last time your favorite team played the Patriots. You remember the game too well already.
Patrick Mahomes' comeback. Ward's interception. Dee Ford's offsides. The coin flip. An overtime loss in the franchise's first-ever AFC Championship Game at Arrowhead Stadium.
You've been through enough. No need to go back. But we're going to tell you this anyway, so here's your warning in case you want to protect your heart. Skip to the next section.
Charvarius will also talk about growing up next to a cesspool, of waking up to gunfights, how time as a kid in a wheelchair sticks with him today, and the dark place in which he found himself during training camp, when he thought about quitting football or even hurting himself. He will open his heart, so feel free to jump ahead, but there's this one football thing we need to mention.
Ward is talking about a third-and-10 in overtime, when Patriots receiver Julian Edelman split wide to the right, then motioned toward slot receiver Phillip Dorsett at the snap. Ward followed Edelman, the snap timed so that Dorsett rubbed Ward and gave Edelman an extra step.
Tom Brady's pass, of course, was completed. First down. Three plays later, another conversion. Three plays after that, the touchdown that ended the Chiefs' season.
"I knew that was coming," Ward says. "But I couldn't do nothing about it."
Ward means he could not stop it because of how he and his teammates were coached. The Patriots had run the exact same play on a third down earlier in the drive, on the other side of the field: Edelman split wide left, motioning toward Dorsett in the slot, his route aided by a rub, the pass completed for a first down.
"So I knew it was coming," Ward continues. "I couldn't do nothing about it because I was told to stay down. If I would've been like, 'Nah, nah, nah, let's in-and-out,' it would've played out different. (If they) kick a field goal, miss or make it, Pat Mahomes goes down and scores a touchdown and we win the game and we're in the Super Bowl.
"I was instructed to stay down, but I could've told (fellow cornerback Kendall) Fuller, 'Man, let's in-and-out.' Because the same thing just happened on the other side."
Ward pauses. Bob Sutton, then the Chiefs' defensive coordinator, had been clear in his directives on the Patriots' fateful drive. Players lose jobs for freelancing.
"But I'm the one that's playing," Ward says. "I still could've overruled that, and told Fuller, 'Let's work together.'"
Another pause.
"Bob was ... man."
One more pause.
"I ain't going to say nothing about that."
This is Charvarius Ward saying that in his fourth game as a starting cornerback he could've defended an overtime pass and given the eventual NFL MVP the chance to send his franchise to its first Super Bowl in nearly half a century.
And it is not the most interesting thing he will say in this conversation, which happened over the summer in Los Angeles, or others that will follow via texts, in the Chiefs' locker room and across the table from his mother in a spare room at his house.
This story is nearly a year in the making, when we published a column about that wheelchair and how Ward didn't play football as a kid because he wouldn't leave his mama's side. He reached out shortly after that piece was published with a message: "Crazy part is that it's way more to that story."
