DETROIT -- Whether the Green Bay Packers want to admit it or not -- and most, if not all, of them fall into the latter category -- they have a problem. And that problem was outfitted in Honolulu blue and silver Thursday night.
The Detroit Lions didn't just sweep the season series with their thrilling 34-31 win at Ford Field. It was their sixth win over the Packers in the past seven meetings. It's a run that dates to the regular-season finale in 2021.
This after Packers coach Matt LaFleur won his first five games against Detroit. Lions coach Dan Campbell, with his aggressive approach, has flipped this division.
LaFleur, however, left his players with this message in the visitors locker room: "I told our team, I mean, we're going to have to earn the right to potentially come back here, and it's not going to be easy. And we've got to put in the work, but I'm confident in the resiliency of our group and that they're going to continue to fight and push each other to get better and stay connected, because I do think we have a pretty good football team."
After what happened Thursday, however, it's a team that might have to go on the road in the playoffs. The NFC North is now all but lost for the Packers, who at 9-4 trail the Lions (12-1) by three games and would lose the head-to-head tiebreaker. The Vikings (10-2) are sandwiched between them.
"We lost by three points," Packers defensive tackle Kenny Clark said. "We played good football; we've played good games. They're not a team that we're scared of by any means."
Clark is right: It was a game that could have gone either way.
Yet it was a familiar result in part because of several factors:
A slow start, during which the Packers went punt, punt, lost fumble (by receiver Christian Watson in Lions' territory) on their first three possessions.
An offensive pass interference call against Watson that took a touchdown catch by running back Josh Jacobs off the board in the fourth quarter, leaving the Packers with a field goal. LaFleur called it a "bad playcall" on his part, and Watson said, "I just have to find a way to avoid it."
Lions quarterback Jared Goff's perfect fourth quarter, when he completed every pass he threw -- 10-for-10, including a 16-yarder to Amon-Ra St. Brown on second-and-17 from the Packers' 37-yard line with 1:27 remaining. Cornerback Keisean Nixon said St. Brown should have been called for offensive pass interference because he "just two-hand pushed on top of the route and they didn't call it." Two plays later -- including a gutsy fourth-and-1 conversion by running back David Montgomery -- the Lions were in position to win with a chip-shot field goal as time expired.
"It's only a handful of plays that separate these types of games," LaFleur said.
So close, yet so far away from a potential rematch, which likely wouldn't come until the second weekend of the playoffs or perhaps a week later in the NFC Championship Game.
"That's one thing we just got to continue to take a week at a time like we always talk about," said Packers quarterback Jordan Love, who is 1-3 as a starter against the Lions with the only win coming here on Thanksgiving 53 weeks ago. "Obviously, we got a couple games left here, and we're trying to finish on the right note and win out these last couple of games, handle business, take it one game at a time, and obviously we'll see what happens postseason time."
If indeed there's a rematch, the Packers will surely lean on the NFL cliché that it's hard to beat a team three times in a season.
"We'll be all right," Packers safety Xavier McKinney said. "We'll probably see them again. I don't think it's a psychological thing. These two games, you watch these games and it's right there now. It's just little things. It's not even they're doing things to necessarily beat us. We're beating ourselves. If you look at these two games that we played them, we had beaten ourselves. We just gotta do a better job with that."