The San Francisco 49ers outscored opponents 64-30 in their two playoff victories leading to their last Super Bowl appearance during the 2019 season. The team cruised through the postseason on the way to the game against the Kansas City Chiefs, resulting in a heartbreaking defeat.
This season presented a different narrative. The 49ers found themselves staging comebacks in both playoff victories, notably overcoming a 17-point deficit on Sunday in the NFC Championship Game against the Detroit Lions. San Francisco secured victories against the Green Bay Packers and the Lions, each by a narrow three-point margin.
Does head coach Kyle Shanahan believe these hard-fought wins will provide added benefits in their Super Bowl rematch with the Chiefs?
"I always think when you go through stuff like this, it hardens you and prepares you for any situation," Shanahan told reporters via a conference call on Monday. "You want to be able to go through tons of games and be able to win games any way possible, and I always feel we're capable of winning a game any way possible, but it just hasn't gone that way this year, totally.
"We've been able to win a bunch of games pretty easily where that fourth quarter isn't so stressful, and the ones that we lost, usually, you could see that happening earlier before that, too. So to get in some games like this, it's just good experience for our players, and to go through it, and to make sure to see how important it is to go through all four quarters, win or lose, that you're never out of it."
This was always the goal. The 49ers had Super Bowl aspirations from the moment the clock hit zero in last season's NFC Championship Game defeat. Even down by 17 at halftime on Sunday, the goal never changed. The team's belief that they could reach the Super Bowl never wavered.
"Every team usually talks that way, but you always know when you have a true chance at that," Shanahan said. "And we feel we've had a chance, really, every year since '19. And so we try not to talk about it. Our biggest thing always [that] we try to talk about is winning our games and our division so we can get in the tournament. And then we look to the next thing with the playoffs and trying to give us our best situation in the playoffs and kind of one step at a time.
"We kind of hit all those goals this year, and we just hit our second to last one last night, and we got one left. We would have been disappointed if we didn't get to this point, and we're going to be disappointed if we don't finish the job in two weeks. So that's kind of how it goes in this league, and hopefully, we'll end it the right way and take a few months off and do the same thing in training camp next year."