Will Rams’ momentum be enough in postseason?

Does momentum really matter once everyone starts fresh?

We might get a hint Sunday evening in Detroit. The Rams are the proverbial team nobody wants to play, roaring out of the bye week with seven victories in their final eight games to turn around a season in which expectations were universally low.

They have re-tooled and re-energized, finishing 10-7. They even won a game when they had one hand tied behind their backs, edging the San Francisco 49ers in Sunday’s regular-season finale to secure the No. 6 seed – and end a nine-game regular season losing streak to their rivals – without Matthew Stafford or Cooper Kupp or Aaron Donald and with rookie sensation Puka Nacua getting most of the second half off after breaking the NFL rookie receiving records for catches and yardage.

Now what? Does that momentum, or that winning attitude or winning feeling or mojo or juju or whatever you want to call it, carry over into the postseason?

Maybe.

“Well, I think you want to use some positive momentum,” Rams coach Sean McVay said Monday. “But you know the playoffs. It’s the closest thing to March Madness that sports sees, because it’s a one-game elimination tournament and it’s really about who plays the best in that 3½-hour window.”

Anyway, momentum is relative. The last game, as mentioned above, was one where both the Rams and 49ers held out key players. The week before, the Rams had to hold on to win against the New York Giants, 26-25, when Mason Crosby – the kicker they’d waived earlier in the season – pulled a potential game-winning 54-yard field goal wide left. (That narrow win looked better after the Giants whacked Philadelphia on Sunday, 27-10.)

Then again, as McVay said during the championship year, “There are no style points in the playoffs.”

And, as McVay noted, during the Super Bowl season they lost their regular-season finale, a 27-24 loss to the Niners at SoFi Stadium on a Robbie Gould 24-yard field goal in overtime after the Rams had blown a 17-0 lead and San Francisco had tied the score with 26 seconds left.

All that did, of course, was set up a sequence where the 49ers, pushed into the other half of the playoff bracket, beat Dallas and Green Bay and got to the NFC championship game at SoFi. And maybe that was fate’s way of evening the scales, because the Rams won that one, 20-17 en route to their first Lombardi Trophy in Los Angeles.

The point? It’s not so much the results that have piled up that make a difference now. It’s the intangible and tangible factors that have gotten the Rams here.

“I think that having the resilience and the grit to be able to respond, or to be able to carry momentum, is something that can be a really important factor,” McVay said. “But you can’t do either/or if you don’t possess the mental toughness and an ability to be able to move forward and be where your feet are planted.

“So while I do think that we want to use that as a positive for us, we still have to show up and play well. Because if you don’t, the margin for error is small … I mean, look no further than (the 49ers) game or even the previous week’s game, how easily those could have gone in a different direction. And so the margin for error gets that much smaller. And we’ve got to just go play to the best of our ability and make sure that we understand that those differences in advancing are very slim, especially when you’re talking about the caliber of team that we’re going up against at their home stadium.”

Ah, yes. In precincts throughout the state of Michigan this will be considered the Matt Stafford Bowl, where the beloved quarterback who valiantly tried to keep the Lions afloat during all of those futile seasons will now come into town intending to snatch hope away. But it will also be Jared Goff trying to do the same to his old team, after a Rams tenure that had its high moments but also its tumultuous ones.

There are no hard feelings between Goff and his former coach by now. But really, neither are there that many warm and fuzzy memories of Goff the Ram, a quarterback who was still learning his craft after coming to town as the No. 1 overall draft pick. Lions fans might have fond memories of Stafford but Goff is their guy now, after passing for 4,575 yards and 30 touchdowns (with 12 interceptions and 30 sacks) and leading Detroit to its first division title since 1993.

Now the Lions try for their first victory in a playoff game since 1991, when Wayne Fontes was their coach and Erik Kramer their quarterback. That history, and Lions fans’ psychic torture throughout the years, could come down hard on Goff and his teammates should the Rams get off to a fast start Sunday night.

“There’s four years of great experiences (with Goff) that I have much more appreciation and perspective on than I probably did at the time,” McVay said, noting that the trade did turn out to be a win-win for both sides. The Rams got the piece, in Stafford, that put them over the top and now has them knocking on the door again in this most improbable of seasons. The Lions got a quarterback they could build around.