Aaron Rodgers threw for 341 yards and four touchdowns to continue his mastery of the NFL’s oldest rivalry as the Green Bay Packers beat the Chicago Bears 45-30.

Brady wound up with his seventh NFL championship and was the Super Bowl MVP for the fifth time. “All week he made us believe we were going to win,” Fournette said. “He was amazing and just did it all: blocked, ran, just had an incredible season,” Brady said. Brady's seventh Super Bowl triumph broke a tie he held with three members of Vince Lombardi's great Green Bay Packers teams of the 1960s for most NFL championships. "There's nothing that he can't do: new team, new scheme, first year with a new team and going to the Super Bowl and winning it all.

Brady is shooting for his seventh ring when he leads the Buccaneers (14-5) against the reigning champion Chiefs (16-2) in Super Bowl 55 on Sunday. Brady's postseason record includes a 33-11 mark, 14 conference championship appearances and 10 trips to the Super Bowl. If the Bucs dethrone the champs, Mahomes would become the sixth quarterback Brady has beaten multiple times in the playoffs. Although he’s not showing his age, 43, Brady will be the oldest to play in a Super Bowl, displacing Colts kicker Matt Stover, who was 42 in Super Bowl 44. Unlike Warner, he wasn't going to get ahead of himself and talk about anything but the Super Bowl title in front of him.

Not long after came a seismic jolt, the helicopter crash of Kobe Bryant in the fog-shrouded California hills that reverberated across sports and across continents. Deep into the year, a bookend to Bryant, Diego Maradona died from a heart attack in Argentina weeks after brain surgery, the waves of grief rippling across soccer. The losses, of course, came against a backdrop of a pandemic, its number of fatalities rolled out daily on TV screens. Niekro won 318 games and pitched until he was 48, his knuckleball dancing and mystifying batters across the decades. Kurt Thomas in 1978 became the first U.S. male gymnast to win a world title but lost an Olympic shot in 1980 because of the boycott.

FILE - This Sept. 1972, file photo shows cornerback Herb Adderley, of the Dallas Cowboys NFL football team. Hall of Fame cornerback Herb Adderley has died. Adderley played on six NFL title teams over a 12-year career with Green Bay and Dallas. “Herb Adderley was yet another dominant figure for us on the Packers,” former Packers teammate Bill Curry tweeted. In 2007, Adderley and two other retired players filed a class-action lawsuit against the NFL Players Association, alleging nonpayment of licensing fees.