There is no Super Bowl memory to give you for Jacksonville, and that itself is the story. The Jaguars, born in 1995, have never reached the game. What they have instead is a recurring nightmare one round before it, the AFC Championship Game, where the door has been shut in their faces three separate times.

Three times to the brink

Three times the Jaguars have reached the conference title game. Three times they have been turned away with the Super Bowl one win across the field. The hardest of them came in early 2018, when they led New England in the fourth quarter on the road and could not hold it. A young franchise getting that close, that often, without breaking through is its own quiet cruelty.

What I make of it

Getting to the championship game three times in three decades is more than a lot of older teams can say. But the room next door, the one with the confetti, has stayed locked. Jaguars fans, you have stood in the hallway and heard the party through the wall. I have been in the room and lost. Neither of us got the thing we came for. Yours is the wait. Keep at it.