LAS VEGAS — With the run she’s having, how could Taylor Swift be on anything other than the winning side?
She embraced her boyfriend Travis Kelce and the couple locked lips on the field at Allegiant Stadium after his Kansas City Chiefs beat the San Francisco 49ers 25-22 in what might be a contender for the greatest Super Bowl ever.
It appears poised to break the TV ratings, based on the extra interest. Last year’s game holds the official Nielsen record of 115 million, although the company’s counting methods have shifted over the years.
That assertion is in play now for the Chiefs, who have reached four Super Bowls in five years and won three of them. Now they’ll go for something nobody — not Joe Montana’s 49ers or Tom Brady’s Patriots — has done. Kansas City can win a third consecutive Super Bowl.
That might seem unlikely, but so did this championship for most of the season. The Chiefs went the whole second half of the AFC championship game and the whole first half of the Super Bowl without a touchdown. If they could manage to win it all anyway, what does it take to beat them?
“Battling through the adversity that we went through this year, and the guys staying with the process, keeping believing,” quarterback Patrick Mahomes said. “You never know how it’s going to happen, and to be able to go play three great teams to get to this game and play another great team, and win all those games, it was a true road in the playoffs, and we were able to come through and be Super Bowl champs.”
After the win, though, it was the Kelce and Swift romance that lit up TV screens.
She smiled with her eyes looking misty from tears as she stood next to Kelce’s mother while he held aloft the Lombardi Trophy, shouting “Chiefs nation!” and bellowing a chorus of “Viva Las Vegas.”
Minutes before that, she was smothered by celebrity suite mates, who at various points included Blake Lively, Ice Spice and Lana Del Rey, when the Chiefs scored the winning touchdown in overtime, set up by a key reception by Kelce for a first down.
It completes an epic stretch for Swift, who won album of the year a week earlier for a record fourth time at the Grammys, where she also announced a new album dropping in April before jetting off to Japan for a series of stadium shows.
Soon after flying halfway around the world to get to the game, she strolled through security to enter the stadium along with Lively, Ice Spice and her mom, Andrea Swift. She cuddled with Lively during Post Malone’s performance of “America the Beautiful” and won what appeared to be a beer chugging contest, slamming her cup down to an appreciative roar from the fans.
Swift flew on a private plane across nine time zones and the international date line from the last of four shows at the Tokyo Dome to arrive about two hours before kickoff. The time change allowed her to land in Los Angeles and make the final hop to Las Vegas.
Swift began dating Kelce after he said on his “New Heights” podcast that he had tried and failed to give her a friendship bracelet during her performance at Arrowhead Stadium. Kelce then invited her to watch him perform at the home of the Chiefs, and she surprisingly showed up for their Week 2 game against Chicago.
“Having Taylor as a new Chiefs fan is very unique,” Chiefs owner Clark Hunt said during Super Bowl week. “I don’t ever do an interview without someone asking me about it. I think a lot of players and coaches on the team are in the same boat. The most important thing is we’re happy for the two of them that they have found each other and have such a special relationship.”
Kelce and Swift won’t have a whole lot of time together to celebrate. She is due back across the Pacific later this week. The international leg of her Eras Tour resumes Friday night in Australia with the first of three shows at the Melbourne Cricket Ground.
“This week is truly the best kind of chaos,” she posted Wednesday on Instagram.
By DAVE SKRETTA and NOAH TRISTER AP Sports Writers