As the final seconds of Super Bowl LIV ticked down on Sunday at Hard Rock Stadium and Andy Reid was being swarmed, the face of the Chiefs’ coach became so animated and flush as to appear almost contorted.

As the Chiefs completed their 31-20 victory over San Francisco to win it all for the first time in 50 years, the roaring, glowing-red visage of his euphoria made for a compelling spectacle.

For one shining moment, he was giddy. And it was a beautiful thing to see a man who so often urges his players to “let your personality show” finally uncork his own.

It was a face that a guy you’d never want to play poker against almost certainly never before had allowed himself to release publicly — and of a nature that perhaps he never even had generated privately.

By the time he arrived at his postgame news conference an hour or so after the game had ended, Reid displayed another look he has seldom shown in full view over the last few decades: He was without his customary eye glasses, what with his pair repeatedly fogging up amid a celebration that included a drenching and maybe even a certain mist emanating from the inside looking out.

None of which is to suggest this filter-free jubilation necessarily was the happiest moment of his life. Not for a man of faith who, legendary work ethic notwithstanding, lives with a sense of perspective those closest to him know is what truly defines him.

He finds his fulfillment in friendships and his rewards in mentoring so many and the inherent pleasure of a canvas to create on. More substantially yet, he’s filled up by fatherhood and grandfatherhood and his bond with the one who completes him.

No, not Patrick Mahomes, who animates and enhances Reid’s genius on the field and who was essential to Reid at last seizing the elusive Lombardi Trophy in his 21st season as a head coach. And that pinnacle they just attained isn’t the end so much as a fresh beginning.

We’ll get back to how Mahomes has become Reid’s fountain of youth, but we’re talking about his beloved wife, Tammy, who is entwined with him in everything.

As he playfully reminded us all early Monday morning. Riffing off a question about whether he’d spent the sleepless night before with the trophy, Reid smiled and said, “I spent it with my trophy wife.”

So the abandon that the typically subtle and restrained Reid radiated on Sunday night was less a maximum level of ecstasy than it was a unique form of thrill. And a form that speaks to a fundamentally altered perception of Reid that illuminates a few things that were true long ago … but bear fresh focus and clarity today.

For one thing, Reid now is eminently qualified to enter the Pro Football Hall of Fame in the wake of entering “the stratosphere that we all expected” — as NFL commissioner Roger Goodell termed the Super Bowl breakthrough for the man he noted also has been an “extraordinary help to me as commissioner.”

But Reid, 61, already had a terrific case: He has won the sixth most games among NFL coaches (Paul Brown appears on some lists ahead of Reid, but 52 of Brown’s wins were in the All-America Football Conference before Cleveland entered the NFL). Reid has revived two franchises, starting with Philadelphia in 1999. And he’s an innovator and influencer with an ever-growing coaching tree and 222 career wins.

Then there’s this: While it’s now obvious to more people after being on display for all the world to see, Reid’s relationship with Mahomes rejuvenated an already energized Reid since they had their first meeting before the 2017 NFL Draft.

And it’s telling that when he was asked how much longer he’ll coach, Reid first said that he hasn’t thought about it and that he still enjoys what he’s doing, before glancing towards Mahomes nearby.

“I’ve got this young quarterback over here (who) makes life easy,” he said.

Such a pleasure, and with such chemistry between them, that it’s easy to picture Reid trying to coach Mahomes as many years as he can.

Shoot, who’s to say that if each stays healthy Reid, who turns 62 in March, might not try to coach Mahomes his whole career?

In the hardest days of his life in 2012, after his son Garrett had died and Reid less significantly was on his way to losing his job in Philly, football was part of Reid’s way forward as he took the job in Kansas City. It’s only logical to think that he’ll want to do this as long as he can amid such prosperity and potential.

Which could set a stage for the ultimate collaboration: both entering the Hall of Fame at once.

Sure, that’s presumptuous in many ways, even after Mahomes led the Chiefs to the championship in unprecedented fashion in the Super Bowl era with three straight postseason rallies from double-digits down.

But Mahomes is on a promising initial trajectory after becoming the youngest player to have won both an NFL MVP (last season) and a Super Bowl — as well as the youngest man to win Super Bowl MVP (24 years and 138 days old that day).

Certainly, Reid figures Mahomes is on his way to the Hall: When he was asked late Sunday if he would finally publicly unveil his imitation of Mahomes’ voice, which Reid has called “froggish,” Reid laughingly said, “I’ll get that to you when he’s inducted in the Hall of Fame.”

In the meantime, the impact of Mahomes on Reid is almost tangible. Reid offered a snapshot of that when he was asked for the zillionth time about what he saw early on in Mahomes and gushed in an entirely new way.

With some fresh flourishes, Reid retold the tale of how general manager Brett Veach, then the Chiefs’ co-director of player personnel, had told him Mahomes was the best player he’d ever seen and wore him out by playing videos.

Over time, Reid found himself agreeing with that “pretty bold statement” about the prospect from Texas Tech, but he maintained a healthy skepticism.

“Then you go, ‘Well, let’s see how he does this in the NFL; he can’t do all that stuff,’” Reid said. “Then he came to us and started doing all that stuff.”

And then some, in his own inimitable way as a great leader with the innate ability to make everyone around him better.

“He sees the field, which I appreciate … You say, ‘Well, all quarterbacks see (the field).’ No, they don’t, not like he does,” Reid said, later adding, “After a bit, you’re (thinking) this guy’s unbelievable. He can take it all in. He challenges you as a coach to give him more, so his aptitude is ridiculous.

“And so as a coach, you love that. You’re able to feed him new plays, and he gobbles those things up and makes them look even better than they did on paper.”

When Reid said that, it reminded me of something I’d stumbled upon when I was thinking about their relationship and whether it resembled that of a composer and performer. In the process, I came across an essay on a Stanford website attributed to Samuil Feinberg, a renowned Russian composer and pianist.

It seemed to have an uncanny application to Reid’s creative play designing and Mahomes’ engagement of them, something we already have a sense of in two visionaries who are completing each other’s sentences.

“The composer needs an intermediary-performer, a creative interpreter of his composition …,” Feinberg wrote, adding that at a certain point the artist “is not an ‘executor’ of another’s will; rather the mind of the composer should become the performer’s own, and blend with the individual traits of his talent, with his own artistic aspirations.

“The performer gains strength and courage in this unity, which is necessary for the concrete realization in sound of the ideas and images contained in the work.”

Sounds familiar when it comes to a relationship that Mahomes says thrives because Reid knows “the right time to kind of rein me in but at the same time lets me be who I am.”

“It happens sometimes that a composer is unable to take into account all the technical, colorific and expressive possibilities of a master instrumentalist,” the essay continued. “Sometimes a composer trusts the performer to introduce some changes into the text …

“Such a friendly collaboration may help the author find a path to the most grateful exposition.”

A destination they seemed to reach on Sunday.

Which turns out only to be the impetus for more, thanks to the revamping of a defense to complement Mahomes and a galaxy of offensive stars surrounding him.

When Reid was asked Monday morning about the play inspired by tape from the 1948 Rose Bowl, he smiled and said, “We actually have a whole package of it, so you’ll have to wait until next year to see the rest.”

Bringing a whole new meaning to wait until next year: For all the joy Reid let loose Sunday, the best might still be ahead.

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These four Kansas City Chiefs players did not practice for the second straight day

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