Nope, it’s not what we wanted. Losing 31-24 in front of our home fans for the second time this year to Green Bay for the division title definitely blew balls. BUT – we have punched our ticket to the playoffs, and no one can take that from us.

As coach Jim Caldwell stated, 12 teams get to wake up and prepare for more football tomorrow out of 32, and Detroit is one of them. Granted, we must learn how to make better adjustments on the fly – how did we let Aaron Rodgers have that much time on every throw? Come on – but, we came back to win eight games out of our nine total wins, games we easily could have given up on.

To me, if I’m the football Gods, it all adds up the final spot in the NFC. Yeah, you lost the final three games of the year, but 9-7 is nothing to slouch at in the NFL. This spot was earned: we beat Minnesota twice so they couldn’t creep up and steal the wild card slot; we beat Washington to stay ahead of them by 1/2 a game; and we made miraculous comeback after miraculous comeback in 2016, including beating the Bears at the buzzer for the go-ahead win in the wild card race.

We will start the road to the Super Bowl in Seattle Saturday night. Those were good tests the last three weeks, all playoff-type atmospheres with two on the road. The results no longer matter: what does is that we learn from them. I believe in this team and would have been devastated had they ended their season today. Instead, the show goes on.