Prepare for the mother of all Super Bowls as the Kansas City Chiefs and Taylor Swift take on the San Francisco 49ers

Kansas City and San Francisco will meet in Las Vegas – and amateur air navigation experts are speculating whether a certain famous Chiefs fan can make it on time (she can).

The Super Bowl’s biggest star won’t be playing in the game, but instead watching her partner from a suite. Taylor Swift is expected to rush back from a Tokyo concert to watch Travis Kelce play for a third championship.

What, were you expecting someone else?

Of course the Kansas City Chiefs are heading back to the Super Bowl. Of course Patrick Mahomes, Travis Kelce, head coach Andy Reid and the defending champs found a way to prevail in an overheated roller coaster of a season in which they sucked up most of the planet’s media oxygen, but didn’t play coherent football until this month.

That’s what great teams do, figure it out, when the early reviews are deservedly brutal, the haters pile on and the “experts” declare them kaput. The Chiefs, wheezing and angry mid-December, are going to be exactly where they wanted to be on Feb. 11 — at the first-ever Super Bowl in Las Vegas, home of Wayne Newton, airport slot machines and the Stanley Cup champion Golden Knights. They will meet the San Francisco 49ers, who won the NFC title by snatching the soul right out of the poor Detroit Lions.

Kansas City’s 17-10 road victory over Baltimore in the AFC Championship was an experienced display of management calm — especially in contrast to the mistake-prone Ravens, who played like they’d all just met 10 minutes before the game. This was a messy contest K.C. didn’t clinch until late, but another game which showed why the Chiefs remain the NFL standard — and why the dynasty talk may not be premature.

As long as Patrick Mahomes is there, they’re going to be really, really good.

OK. I’m going to get into it now, and if you don’t like it, go for a walk and yell at all the neighborhood owls.

The game’s best player, Patrick Mahomes, will play in his fourth Super Bowl in just five years.

The Chiefs victory also means an extended season arc for the nation’s other top entertainment juggernaut: the courtship of Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce and the pop superstar Taylor Swift.

If you were already fatigued on Travis and Taylor, if you were lighting pregame candles to support Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson, if you’ve been sending CBS handwritten letters begging them to stop showing the 12-time Grammy winner applauding first downs (she’s begging them, too, it appears), it might be time to pick a remote island in the Pacific, canoe there, and sit on a turtle shell for at least the next two weeks.

Taylor Swift wins. Don’t you know?

Kelce clearly does, also. The 34-year-old from Ohio wound up catching 11 passes for 116 yards against the Ravens and being named the game’s MVP, vaporizing the mid-season fury about his dropsies and whether or not his game was in a distracted decline.

Kelce is in the back nine of his career by his own admission, and when he sorely barrels up the field, it looks like his bruises have bruises. But lately he’s relocated some magic, and remains Mahomes’s in-case-of-emergency fire extinguisher.

And he’s America’s No. 1 boyfriend, so there’s that.

As for The Other Team in this playoff, the San Francisco 49ers — they are confirmed dream killers. They’re the team that had the audacity to stun America’s New Team, the formerly sad-sack Detroit Lions, who rumbled into Santa Clara and actually ran off to a 24-7 lead.

It seemed just, after generations of disaster. This was going to be Detroit’s day.

Then suddenly, it wasn’t. The Niners had a rap for being a lousy comeback team, but here they were, coming back, erasing a 17-point third-quarter lead in a handful of minutes. Detroit was a stunned and wobbled contender, unable to get much going.

All of those icky old Lions vibes came rushing back. Were they really going to let this happen, right here on the doorstep? There was no way a single sport could be so cruel, re-flattening a franchise that had been crushed so many times. These weren’t the Same Old Lions, after all — these were head coach Dan Campbell’s silver and Honolulu blue invincibles, full of belief, ready to kick in the door of Detroit’s first-ever Super Bowl.

Right?

Right?

Christian McCaffrey celebrates his first touchdown in the NFC Championship game. He will lead the 49ers into the Super Bowl.

These weren’t the Same Old Lions. But football is indeed that cruel. All competition is. San Francisco got in front and stayed in front. The soul-crushing comeback was complete.

“When you lose that way, it’s hard,” an emotional Campbell said afterward. “You feel like you get your heart ripped out.”

You do, if you’re a Lions fan, but let’s be sure to credit the Niners, who didn’t pack it up early.

What a season it’s been for San Francisco quarterback Brock Purdy, the dead-last pick in the 2022 NFL Draft who flirted with MVP hype this season before a midwinter slide. Purdy is the kind of outsider who will always have his doubters, and you could hear them howling during Sunday’s first half.

Not anymore. Purdy finished with 20 of 31 passes for 267 yards, most of it in the second half, as the Niners roared back and kept applying pressure. He got 89 yards of receiving from Deebo Samuel and 90 yards of rushing from Christian McCaffrey, but it was Purdy’s agile 48 yards rushing which saved San Francisco from oblivion.

It’s gotten lost in the late season noise, but the former Iowa State Cyclone is one of the great NFL underdog stories — ever.

All of this (a rematch of SB LIV in Miami) is now headed to Nevada. A Super Bowl in Vegas was once an unimaginable idea — the appearance-crazed NFL bringing its biggest game to Sin City — but the Raiders are already in town, and every sport has sold itself over to gaming companies by now.

Travis Kelce with his fellow NFL superstar brother Jason. The pair host a popular podcast.

You’re going to hear every angle, because the Super Bowl is pretty much the final gasp of the monoculture, the last thing that all of America does together. Even if it’s not for the game, but just to mock the commercials.

So you’re going to get endless amounts about Brock Purdy’s underdog saga and Patrick Mahomes’s Hall of Fame case and whether or not a Chiefs win (which would be a third in five years) anoints them as the next Patriots (the Patriots — but happier!).

And unless you start paddling soon on that canoe, you’re going to get a click-crazed earful about a certain Chiefs fan who’s off to start performing in Asia on an international tour, and whether or not she’ll make it back for the big game in Vegas.

Of course she will. It’s the Super Bowl. Would you expect anything else?