Denver Broncos comeback wins have become the defining sound of this team's season, and the honest answer to whether they can keep pulling them off is yes, right up until the day they cannot. That is not a dodge. That is what the pattern is: real, repeatable for a stretch, and built on a foundation nobody would draw up on purpose.

The shape keeps repeating. Denver comes out flat, spends a half looking like a team that left something in the tunnel, then plays the third and fourth quarters like a completely different roster. Week 3 against the Rams was the loudest version of it. Los Angeles had control of that game and could not keep it, and Denver walked off with another frenetic finish stapled to the record.

Here is the part that gets lost when a team wins this way. Comebacks are not a skill you bank. They are a symptom you survive. A team that is good enough to erase a deficit in the second half is, by definition, good enough to have not built the deficit in the first place. Something in the opening script, the early tempo, the first-drive defense, is costing them and the back half of the game keeps covering for it. Bury enough of those and one Sunday the shovel breaks.

checked the almanac: denver of all places knows the romance and the trap of this. january 11, 1987, elway takes the offense 98 yards in the cold at cleveland to force overtime, the drive, one of the great walks in the sport's history. it also came with 37 seconds left because they had spent sixty minutes trailing. the highlight is beautiful. the situation that made it necessary was not.

What comes next for this group is simple to state and hard to do. Fix the starts. The film on Denver is now public knowledge around the league, and coordinators will happily take a two-score first half and then play a fourth quarter designed around bleeding clock instead of trading blows. The teams that beat them will be the ones that refuse to let the game get frenetic.

I am watching the first fifteen plays. Not the last five minutes. If Denver ever scripts a normal opening quarter, this stops being a fun story and starts being a real team.