SAN DIEGO _ He wore a Chargers hoodie to the postgame media chat, Philip Rivers did. It was near midnight Thursday in the chilly, football-loving Midwest and Rivers had just rallied his team to a 29-28 victory over the Chiefs before more than 75,000 fans at Arrowhead Stadium.
In front of "Chargers" were two other words emblazoned onto the San Diegan's dark-blue hoodie.
Los Angeles.
Doesn't quite roll off the tongue, does it?
Then, it was onto a bus and plane back to Los Angeles International Airport and the shuttle to Chargers HQ in Orange County by 3:30 a.m.
From there, traffic would be mercifully light for the 75-mile shot to the Rivers home in a north San Diego suburb.
Next month brings the Super Bowl tournament, and for the first time in five years, Rivers will be part of it.
It will be a Super Bowl journey truly like no other, should it unfold as Rivers would most want.
Say the Chargers (11-3) were to win the AFC West, giving them the No. 1 seed and a first-round bye.
Home games would be at the Carson soccer stadium they're renting. Seating capacity is about 25,000, not even half of every other current NFL venue.
If regular-season form holds, perhaps 10,000 to 15,000 of the fans who show up would cheer for the Chargers. Most everyone else in the crowd would be for the visiting club, and loudly so.
The West-champion Chargers winning one playoff game, the Divisional-round contest, would book the AFC Championship Game in the Carson thimble.
One doubts even the Truman Show-like capabilities of the NFL's media machine would gin up anything like the typical gravitas of the event, given the venue and perhaps split-partisanship of the crowd.
Rivers isn't an NFL historian but acknowledged the Carson flavor "would be different" by NFL playoff norms. He added: "We all know that."
May not happen, of course.
It'd take the Chiefs (11-3) losing to either the Seahawks (8-5) or the Raiders (3-10) and the Chargers beating the Ravens (7-6) and the Broncos (6-7) for Rivers to open the playoffs in Carson.
Nor is Rivers a mathematician, but winning two games is easier than winning three.
If the Chiefs hold on and capture the West, it'll take three playoff victories for Rivers to reach his first Super Bowl.
In the 16 Super Bowl tournaments in the current era of 32 NFL clubs, only three wild-card teams _ the 2005 Steelers, 2007 Giants and 2010 Packers _ won the Super Bowl.
All three wild-card champs were quarterbacked by a Rivers contemporary: Ben Roethlisberger, Eli Manning and Aaron Rodgers, each man at least 10 years younger than Rivers' current age of 37 but none of them, by appearance, as geeked up as Rivers was late Thursday.
The Chargers are not a team that any AFC club would like to see visit in January.
With comeback victories this month against the North-leading Steelers in Pittsburgh and the West-leading Chiefs in Kansas City, they are 6-0 away from Los Angeles this year. (Two losses were at Carson, the other to the Rams at the Coliseum).
Yet Rivers said home, such as it is, still beats the road.
"There is no doubt it is better than here," he said, comparing Carson with Kansas City, "or New England, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Houston or anywhere else we might have to go. At least we will be able to hear a little bit."
