Zak Keefer | IndyStar

Scott Horner, scott.horner@indystar.com

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An airplane that never took off; a call to a lake house in northern Indiana; a scorching night under the lights in Westfield, and a coming out party in Landover, Md.

From some of the franchise’s darkest hours to the season’s sizzling finish, 2018 saw the Indianapolis Colts climb from the league basement to an improbable playoff berth. What a ride it's been. And it's not over yet.

Here are six scenes that helped shape a most stirring season:

1. February 7. Chris Ballard’s moment.

The day before, the private jet had just sat there, gassed up in the hangar and ready for a flight to Massachusetts it’d never make. Josh McDaniels was scheduled to fly to Indianapolis two days after the Super Bowl; when the flight was pushed back – first for a few hours, later until the next morning – the Indianapolis Colts didn’t blink. The deal was done. Their coach was coming.

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They were wrong. By noon the next day, Chris Ballard met the most important moment of his tenure, a news conference no NFL general manager ever wants to hold: He had to explain why the head coach he’d hired had ditched his team at the 11th hour. Ballard was ticked. The fan base was shaken. The Colts were embarrassed.

“We’ll survive,” came the word from inside the team facility late that night.

They were right.

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If there was an early indication this Colts’ season wasn’t going to follow script, this was it. “We got snaked,” one player gruffed the next day. Ballard, meanwhile, was undeterred. “There was no persuasion,” he said of his brief phone call with McDaniels the night before. “Let me make this clear: I want, and we want as an organization, a head coach that wants to be all in.”

Ballard spoke for more than 20 minutes that day, galvanizing that shaken fan base, reassuring a city that Josh McDaniels’ about-face wasn’t going to bury the Colts’ 2018 or beyond. “I love when you get to see authenticity from people,” Andrew Luck would say later of Ballard’s passionate news conference, “especially your leader in this building.”

Three days later Ballard spent two hours in a room with Frank Reich. When he left, it hit him like a ton of bricks: Reich was so self-assured that he hadn’t even asked about Luck’s surgically repaired shoulder, and the uncertainties that came with it. Not once. In a two-hour interview.

This coach, Ballard told himself, didn’t need persuaded. Reich was all in.

Ten months later, he looks like the best backup plan in head-coaching history.

2. April 26. Hello, Quenton Nelson.

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The call came quickly; the Colts weren’t hesitating. Not on this pick. Soon as Denver grabbed Bradley Chubb fifth overall in the first round of last spring’s draft, Chris Ballard turned in the card. Then he dialed the number for the bruising left guard from Notre Dame who’d help transform his offensive line in a few short months. Quenton Nelson answered from his parents’ vacation home on Lake Syracuse in Northern Indiana.

“Quenton, it’s Chris Ballard with the Colts, tell your parents they don’t have to move,” the GM began.

“Let’s go!” Nelson shouted while family and friends erupted around him.

Ballard passed the phone to his head coach. Frank Reich told Nelson what the Colts wanted from him.

“You’re the cornerstone of what we’re expecting to build, and we’re expecting you to bring everything you got – that nasty attitude, that physicality, the leadership,” Reich said.

Finally, it was the owner’s turn. Jim Irsay told Nelson about some of the greatest offensive linemen he’s ever seen in person, from John Hannah to Anthony Munoz, then left him with this: “Andrew needs protection.”

Nelson brought it. His arrival sparked a stunning revival: the Colts went from allowing an NFL-worst 56 sacks in 2017 to a league-best 18 this year. Nelson played every snap. Allowed four QB hits and two sacks all year. Made the Pro Bowl as a rookie. Made everyone around him better.

“He’s changed the way the game is played with those guys, or at least, changed the accepted level of play beyond, ‘I’m blocking my guy,’” Nelson’s position coach, Dave DeGuglielmo, said midseason. “You see him knock people down, you see him go after linebackers. He plays with a nastiness and brings out the natural nastiness in other players.

3. July 29. ‘Andrew’s back.’

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It came in the midst of his third practice, and it was a throw so effortless that it reminded everyone there how easy he once made it look. Two rusty workouts behind him, under the lights at Westfield’s Grand Park, while uncertainties still lingered about his form and future, Andrew Luck looked off the safety and fired a dart across the field to his old, trusty target, T.Y. Hilton. It was a deep gain, maybe 30, 40 yards, that made the crowd roar. It also hinted at all that was to come.

Anthony Castonzo, Luck’s left tackle of seven years and one of his closest friends on the team, saw the throw and promptly turned to the teammate next to him. “Wow,” he said to guard Matt Slauson. “Andrew’s back.”

He was back. He went 19-for-22 for two touchdowns and no interceptions that night under the lights at Grand Park.

And so it went from there. Sixteen starts and still no pain in that shoulder. Career-bests in completions (430), completion percentage (67.3) and passer rating (98.7). Thirty-nine touchdown throws, one behind his career-high, and second only to to Kansas City’s Patrick Mahomes. Very likely the league’s Comeback Player of the Year. MVP consideration. A complete and convincing return to form.

Most important, 10 wins, nine of them since Week 7.

“I feel fulfilled,” Luck said late in the season. “I’ve learned a lot about myself. The searing memories stay there, and they help me with my approach. And that approach is I always need to get better.”

4. Sept. 1. Youth movement.

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It was a stunning move at the time, but afforded the luxury of four months of hindsight, Chris Ballard’s decision to cut veteran defensive player John Simon at the end of training camp was the right move, unpopular as it was. Simon had been among the unit’s most productive players in 2017, and in the preseason. The Colts sent him packing a week before the opener.

The thinking: Simon wasn’t a longterm solution at defensive end, and Colts’ brass wanted to find out if the younger players on the roster were. (Simon would finish with two sacks and 17 tackles for the Patriots in mostly reserve duty this year.) A pair of Colts rookies, Kemoko Turay and Tyquan Lewis, have shown flashes this season. As a whole, sparked by a career year from Margus Hunt, the steady production of Jabaal Sheard and the big-play potential of Denico Autry, the defensive line has been a revelation.

The Colts finished 2018 one of just three teams in football (Houston, New Orleans) to not allow a 100-yard rusher in any game this season.

“That’s hard as hell to do,” Sheard said this week. “You know how hard that is to do?”

They were also second in tackles for loss (91) and allowed the third-fewest points across the second half of the season (less than 17 per game). Most figured the Colts’ D would be among the league’s worst in 2018. It finished 11th.

5. Sept. 16. A star is born.

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While the first flicker came early in training camp, Darius Leonard falling backward and intercepting Andrew Luck during the team’s very first practice, the sort of did-he-just-do-that? play that would come to define his sterling rookie campaign, the real coming out party didn’t arrive until Week 2.

On the road in Washington, Leonard put together one of the best games by a Colts’ rookie ever. Eighteen tackles – 11 in the second half. A sack. A forced fumble. A pass-breakup that sealed the 21-9 win.

That’s the day The Maniac introduced himself to the NFL.

He’s been stating his case for Defensive Rookie of the Year ever since.

Despite missing a start, Leonard led the league in tackles (163) and set the Colts’ franchise mark in the process. His seven sacks were the second-most by any rookie, an incredible tally for an off-the-ball linebacker who rarely rushes. The amount of players in NFL history to finish a year with 160-plus tackles and seven sacks?

Two. Leonard’s one of them.

He was one of the rookies who gathered at Najee Goode’s place for New Year’s Eve this week. It was there that Goode, a former Philadelphia Eagle, brought out his Super Bowl ring from last winter. “Just think,” Goode told Leonard and the others there, “in 30 days you could be playing for this.”

“That’s when it hit me,” Leonard said.

6. Sept. 29. ‘We’re not playing for a tie.’

Tie game. Fourth-and-four from his own 44 yard line. Twenty-seven seconds left in overtime. The first-year head coach didn’t blink.

“Our quarterback was on fire,” Frank Reich would say later, “and I didn’t feel like they could stop us.”

He drew heaps of criticism for his gutsy and uber-aggressive call back in Week 4, one that cost the Colts a tight game at home against Houston. But there was something telling about the moment, and the coach’s conviction, and what his players said about it afterwards.

“Loved it,” said Andrew Luck. “We’re not playing for a tie. Everyone in that locker room frickin’ loves it. That’s an attitude we can get behind.”

Labeling that decision a turning point feels insufficient – the Colts did lose two straight after that – but it nonetheless spoke to something that started to happen in Indianapolis in 2018. Luck was right. Reich’s team did get behind that attitude.

Slowly, the coach’s understated swagger seeped into this group, and the Colts came together.

The mindset inside the locker room shifted. “It’s not, ‘Let’s go out and play hard and hope to win,’” explained rookie Nyheim Hines. “No. It’s, ‘Let’s go out and execute because we expect to win.’”

That’s how 1-5 became 5-5, and how 5-5 became 10-6. Reich never blinked. Neither did his team.

Now the Colts head to Houston, eager to see how long this ride can last.