The Lions’ fall to overtime with the Rams on Sunday night was bad news for Detroit, as they held a 17-3 lead in the second half. But after the dust settled on the home team’s lone drive of the extra period, I — Lions nut — was almost grateful for L.A.’s Matt Stafford-orchestrated comeback. Without him, I wouldn’t have been able to enjoy David Montgomery shoving the ball down the defense’s throat with a confident dominance that would have felt foreign in this city not so long ago.

The senior half of the Lions’ running back duo touched the ball five times in eight plays, gaining 45 of Detroit’s 70 yards. He trampled a depleted defense. He crossed midfield in a wide-open lane at the line of scrimmage, eluded a cluster of would-be tacklers for a nine-yard gain to get into field-goal range, charged forward and carried a few guys through the red zone, and capped the night with a punch-in TD. It was the penultimate run on third-and-1, with Montgomery obscured by a cloud of big men who kept drifting to his left, almost as if he were reassuring the crowd that everything had been under control all along.

This was Dan Campbell GRIT—not a slogan on a T-shirt, but a physical brand of football the Lions have traditionally watched with their backs to the grass. Montgomery ran like someone impatient to end the game without gimmicks or defensive challenges, because that’s what he was.

“I’ll be honest, I hate overtime,” he said after the game. “It’s a late game, I want to see my son. But we got there.”

A fairly bumpy Week 1 for the Lions, in which they had to run a two-minute field goal drill to escape a familiar line collapse, ended in a victory and renewed confidence for this team. It’s going to be a strange season. This time last year, I was freaking out that they had somehow managed to beat Kansas City in NFL italics. In 2024, however, an opening night win was the expectation; ending the season with a win in February is the extremely dangerous hope.

I was back in Michigan for Labor Day, and the sentiment there is torn between excitement and a traumatized nervousness about feeling that excitement. Everyone in the state has grown up believing that the Lions will blow them away. It feels downright blasphemous to expect anything good. The second half of Sunday’s game, if the untested Jake Bates had botched a punt or if the defense hadn’t forced Stafford off the field near the end or if Jared Goff had thrown another pick, would have made sense to Lions fans. We’ve seen it, in every conceivable form. But now we’re seeing something better.