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I mean, if you just looked at the back of his football card — and we’re here assuming they still make football cards — you’d think this was just another year in the career of a future Hall of Famer. But that doesn’t really tell the whole story.

“When it didn’t come back right away, it was frustrating because I put so much effort into it,” Elimimian says. “I was thinking, what could I have done differently? In training camp and those first couple of games, I wasn’t able to do the things I was accustomed to doing.

“It’s hard to explain, but your body just doesn’t do what you want it do as fast as you want to do it. I just realized it takes time.”

It sounds like such a simple thing, even if it was the hardest thing he’s done in his seven years with the Lions.

Elimimian has made it all the way back from a devastating injury which, in no particular order, ended his 2015 season, led to a restructuring of his contract, and, oh yes, threatened to end his career. In the Lions’ seventh game of last year, he ruptured his right Achilles in Hamilton, underwent surgery shortly thereafter, then went about the gruelling, remorseless work of rehab, mostly in Los Angeles, where he moved back in with his mother.

Ten months later he arrived at Lions’ training camp and pronounced he was the same player, but through the first six weeks of this season, he clearly wasn’t.

Then came the call with his father in late August, around the time the Lions went on a two-game Eastern swing through Ottawa and Toronto, et voila. Elimimian recorded nine tackles in the win over the Redblacks, then backed that up six days later with a monster 14-tackle, one-sack, one-interception game against the Argonauts.