SEATTLE — Early on, anyway, the 2026 Kansas City Chiefs sure were trending toward redemption and resumption of their modern identity as a perennial championship contender.

In the wake of the distressing 6-11 dud last season, they entered Sunday night’s game against reigning Super Bowl champion Seattle at Lumen Field as one of just two remaining undefeated NFL teams. Moreover, they led the league in offensive yards per game, were second in points allowed and generally seemed to be restoring the new world order of the Mahomes Era.

But their 20-3 loss to the Seahawks (4-3) was so thorough, unsightly and disillusioning as to render the 5-0 run-up to it entirely suspect — especially considering the Chiefs’ thorny schedule ahead.

Yes, Seattle is a fine team and the ol’ one-game overreaction is a real phenomenon when it comes to NFL games. No doubt the Chiefs are capable of resetting.

Trouble is, this loss seemed to expose every worrisome vulnerability they had flashed in beating teams with a combined record of 11-22.

And it also came with the deflating issue of the stifling of something we were starting to take for granted: the exhilarating play of former Seahawks running back Kenneth Walker III, who had been a revelation until he mustered just 36 yards on 14 carries Sunday.

An inconsistent offensive line couldn’t make room for Walker.

Nor could it negotiate much space for quarterback Patrick Mahomes, who appeared uncharacteristically frazzled at times — including on an ill-considered toss for an interception and a fumble he recovered. It took him about three quarters to get any rhythm as he completed just 19 of 33 passes for 165 yards overall.

Minus the injured Rashee Rice again, the Chiefs’ receiving corps struggled to get open — at least in the time Mahomes was allotted — and his targets dropped four passes.

But, hey, at least the Chiefs didn’t have any red-zone issues … because they never even penetrated the red zone.

On the other side of the ball, the Kansas City defense couldn’t generate a single sack for the fourth time this season. Not coincidentally, Seattle converted 11 of 16 third-down situations and amassed 410 yards — nearly double what the Chiefs produced (213).

And just to complete the all-phases breakdown, Harrison Butker missed two more field goals — meaning he’s missed an NFL-most 15 kicks (10 field-goal attempts and five point-afters) since the start of the 2025 season, per The Associated Press.

Lurking ahead now are the likes of the Denver Broncos, who have won four of five since the Chiefs clobbered them 31-10 in the season opener at Arrowhead. Down the road is a stretch run with games at Buffalo, the Los Angeles Rams and Cincinnati and December visits from the defending AFC champion New England Patriots and the San Francisco 49ers, who were undefeated until Sunday.

So this was a clunker — and worrisome.

But it may or may not be defining.

“Definitely humbling,” Chiefs defensive end George Karlaftis said, “and we’ll see how we respond.”

Past performance definitely is no guarantee of future results, of course. But with the emphatic exception of last season, the Chiefs since the advent of Mahomes routinely have improved through the course of the season and rather typically have peaked late.

That’s how they ended up playing in seven straight AFC Championship Games, after all, and appearing in five Super Bowls in six seasons and winning three of those.

A sustaining aspect of that has been Steve Spagnuolo’s defenses tending to coalesce mid-to-late season on the way to six top-10 finishes in seven years.

And part of the Chiefs’ resilience has been the indomitable will of Mahomes.

Maybe the most vivid reminder was what happened after a similarly depressing defeat in 2021 in the last game in which Mahomes played and the Chiefs managed only a field goal.

That 27-3 skunking at Tennessee left the Chiefs reeling at 3-4, and afterward it seemed like the end of the innocence.

It was troubling enough in real-time, and in the context of that first half of the season, to wonder if the Chiefs were on the verge of squandering Mahomes’ potential.

“It’s been kind of rainbows and flowers and awesome for these last few years,” Mahomes said that day. “But whenever you want to build something substantial and you want to build something great, you’re going to go through (times) like this.”

If it sounded like denial in the moment, it proved to be anything but.

The Chiefs won their next 12 games, punctuated by the so-called 13-second game against Buffalo, before falling to the Bengals in the AFC Championship Game.

When I asked Mahomes on Sunday night about the key to that sort of transformation, he stressed one particular point:

“I think the biggest thing is you’ve got to feel it,” he said.

Meaning the burn of this loss, the clarifying reality check and the imperative to improve.

“Obviously,” he said, “it starts right now.”

So it got real for the Chiefs late Sunday evening, enough so that coach Andy Reid was talking about the need to go back to the drawing board and how “we all had a piece of that” loss, starting with him.

Few seasons are linear, we know by now, and the track record with Reid and Mahomes and the Chiefs is far more encouraging than alarming in these circumstances.

Just the same, the NFL is a week-to-week proposition and every season its own journey.

The “rainbows and flowers and awesome” might still be out there to be had. But the Chiefs best embrace how much they have to be humble about if they’re going to return to bona fide glory after the apparent illusion of a 5-0 start.

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