Andy Reid finally did it, but can it bring it home?

Andy Reid finally won a big game, leading his Kansas City Chiefs to the Super Bowl for the first time in 50 years, and his first in 15 years.

He’s been hearing the same refrain for years, so when Andy Reid stepped to the podium this week a few days out from the AFC Championship Game, the first question he got wasn’t a surprise.

Why hasn’t he, one of the most accomplished coaches of this era, managed to lead his team all the way to a Super Bowl championship?

Reid’s list of successes is a long one: 207 career regular season wins, seventh all-time, to go along with 14 playoff victories, behind only Bill Belichick among active head coaches. Nine times he’s coached a top-10 offense, 12 times a top-10 defense.

But his list of postseason failures is just as long. Kansas City’s 35-24 victory over the Tennessee Titans on Sunday brought his playoff record back to .500 as he prepares to make his second Super Bowl appearance as a head coach.

The first came 15 years ago, as his Philadelphia Eagles lost to Belichick’s New England Patriots in Super Bowl XXXIX. That’s as close as his teams have ever come. Five other times before this season he’s reached the conference championship game; he lost all five, three of them at home.

He lost to the Rams in 2001, when his Eagles took a 17-13 lead into halftime but didn’t score again until there were two minutes left. After a loss at home to Tampa Bay the following year, Reid’s Eagles made it three in a row in a 14-3 upset loss to Carolina in which they turned the ball over four times and quarterback Donovan McNabb was limited with a rib injury.

Last season was his first trip to the conference title game with the Chiefs, and it might have been the most disappointing. The Chiefs were an offside call away from beating the Patriots while their offense never touched the ball in overtime.

Those losses are now a part of Reid’s legacy. But when he was asked if this year’s game against Tennessee was a chance at personal redemption, he made it clear he wasn’t focused on his own record.

“I’m thinking more about the players than I am sitting here thinking about myself. That’s not where I go,” he said earlier this week, via the Chiefs website. “I try to get the guys ready. Make sure I’m ready then go play. I don’t look at it that way. I look more at the disappointment of the other teams that I’ve coached and how those kids felt.”

Reid has become known almost as much for his issues managing the clock as his success on the field. McNabb’s lack of urgency in the fourth quarter was what became remembered of the Eagles in that Super Bowl. In 2015, again against the Patriots, the Chiefs were faced with a 14-point deficit in the fourth quarter before embarking on a slow, methodical 16-play drive that ended in a touchdown but with only 1:13 left on the clock.

What’s different about Reid’s team this year wears No. 15 in Chiefs red. With all due respect to McNabb and Alex Smith, Reid has never coached a quarterback as dynamic as Patrick Mahomes. He showed it on Sunday, throwing for 294 yards and three touchdowns while putting the Chiefs ahead late in the first half with a highlight-reel run.

This year’s Chiefs team is the most explosive Reid has ever coached, their defense among the most physical he’s ever had. It’s the type of team he’s been waiting his entire 21-year to have, the team that maybe, just maybe, will allow him to erase all the ghosts of postseasons past.

It’s been 50 years and 800 games since the Chiefs last played in a Super Bowl. They’re also a franchise hoping to get over years of postseason disappointment. Reid and the Chiefs were made for each other, and two weeks from Sunday in Miami, they both might get what they’ve waited so long for.