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When the Vikings beat the Saints on Sunday to go to the NFC Championship Game, they did so led by four players that other teams didn’t believe in:

Case Keenum, the starting quarterback who was signed to be a third-stringer but spent the season as the starter, was undrafted out of college, cut by the Texans twice, cut by the Rams once, and largely passed over in free agency last year before the Vikings finally offered him a one-year, $2 million contract. Making $2 million a year is nice for most of us, but in the NFL, where a thoroughly mediocre quarterback like Mike Glennon can sign a three-year, $45 million contract, a quarterback who signs for $2 million is a quarterback without other options.

Adam Thielen, who led the Vikings in receiving during the regular season and added six catches on Sunday, was undrafted coming out of Minnesota State, initially ended up with the Vikings as a tryout player without a contract, and was at first released and put on the practice squad before finally making the team the following year.

Stefon Diggs, who scored Sunday’s spectacular game-winning touchdown as time expired, was a big-time recruit who looked great as a freshman at Maryland but broke his leg as a sophomore and never looked the same after that. He slipped to the fifth round of the NFL draft amid concerns that he wouldn’t ever be able to regain his freshman year form.

Andrew Sendejo, the safety who made a spectacular leaping interception of Drew Brees, can’t even be called an undrafted rookie because after NFL teams passed on him in the draft after a college career at Rice, no NFL team signed him. He had to spend his first season of pro football with the Sacramento Mountain Lions of the United Football League, where he played well enough to get noticed by the Cowboys, who signed him briefly and cut him. He then went to the Jets, who signed him briefly and cut him, before finally signing with the Vikings in 2011, originally making the team for his work on special teams, and finally becoming a defensive starter.

Those are the players who just led the Vikings to within one win of the Super Bowl.

These Vikings are an easy team to root for, and if they can beat the Eagles in the NFC Championship Game, they’ll have a rooting section unlike any in Super Bowl history. That’s because they’d be the first team ever to play the Super Bowl on their home field.

Technically, the Vikings would be the road team in Super Bowl LII because the AFC and NFC alternate and the NFC team was the home team last year. So the Vikings wouldn’t get their choice of home uniforms, and they wouldn’t get to pain the field with their colors in both end zones. But the NFL has confirmed the Vikings will use their home practice facilities and home locker room if they play in the Super Bowl, even though if it’s the Eagles in the Super Bowl, they would practice at the University of Minnesota and use the visitors’ locker room, as the designated NFC road team.

But the really big deal would be the opportunity for tens of thousands of Vikings fans to attend the Super Bowl. Usually Super Bowl crowds aren’t like ordinary NFL crowds, both because a lot of big fans can’t afford to go to the Super Bowl and because tickets are distributed through neutral channels, not through one team’s box office. You can bet, however, that if the Vikings are in a Minnesota Super Bowl, their fans will flood the resale markets and make it something approximating a home crowd. Some Patriots or Jaguars fans will be there, of course, but probably not in huge numbers: For Patriots fans, the Super Bowl is old hat by now, and the Jaguars don’t have a huge traveling fan base.

So if the Vikings are in the Super Bowl, it will feel as much like a home game as any Super Bowl has ever been. And there are plenty of players on that Vikings team who are fun to root for.

Here are my other thoughts from the divisional round of the playoffs:

Steve Gleason is remarkable. Gleason, the former Saint who is now battling ALS, showed the perfect combination of good sportsmanship and good humor in the face of hard times after his team lost to the Vikings. Gleason can’t move at all because of ALS, but he still tweets using software that tracks his eye movement and allows him to type. After the Vikings’ last-second victory, Gleason tweeted, “Congratulations to the Vikings. I’m so in shock I can’t move.”

[tweet https://twitter.com/TeamGleason/status/952714891818921985%5D

The Vikings’ final extra point made Saints bettors very happy. The happiest people after Diggs scored that game-winning touchdown were Vikings fans. But a moment later, the happiest people were bettors who had the Saints +5.5, which was the point spread for the game. The Vikings’ touchdown made the score 29-24, which means if you bet on the Vikings -5.5, you lost. But NFL rules are clear that the game isn’t over until the point-after attempt if there’s a touchdown on the last play, and teams may not leave the field until the game is over. So the officials correctly ordered the Saints to find 11 guys to line up for the extra point. The Vikings didn’t feel the need to kick, so they kneeled down to end the game instead, forgoing the easy point that would have made the difference against the spread. Saints bettors at Vegas casinos cheered.

Bill Belichick was smart. Mike Tomlin was not. The Patriots were playing a Titans defense that is good against the run but bad against the pass, so the Patriots passed, and passed, and passed. They kept throwing the ball because that was the smart thing to do, and by the end of the game Tom Brady had thrown 53 passes even though the Patriots had a big lead and most coaches would have gone to the ground to run time off the clock. The next day the Steelers were playing a Jaguars defense that is good against the pass but bad against the run, so their game plan should have been the reverse: Lots, and lots of running. And yet Le'Veon Bell carried just eight times for 46 yards in the first half, while Ben Roethlisberger had two turnovers on pass attempts, and the Steelers dug a big early hole. Belichick is a master game planner, and it’s surprising how many other coaches — even successful coaches like Tomlin — simply can’t come up with a good game plan the way Belichick can.

Sean Payton wasn’t too smart either. Payton threw away two timeouts in the fourth quarter of a close game with two bad challenges. Conserving timeouts in close games is important, yet so many coaches treat timeouts like they don’t matter.

Pat Shurmur deserves another chance as a head coach. Shurmur, the Vikings offensive coordinator who has interviewed for four head-coaching jobs this offseason, has one previous stint as a head coach, when he won nine games in two years as head coach of the Browns only to have Jimmy Haslam fire him. That’s a little odd, considering that Hue Jackson has won one game in two years as head coach of the Browns and Haslam retained him. In Cleveland, a 5-11 record is respectable, and Shurmur could do well if he got to coach a better team.

Doug Marrone is for real. Marrone is now 13-7 as Jaguars head coach after inheriting a team that Gus Bradley led to a 14-48 record. If they conducted coach of the year voting now instead of at the end of the regular season, it would be hard to choose anyone other than Marrone.

Doug Pederson’s fourth-down calls keep paying off. I wrote before the Eagles beat the Falcons that Pederson had been the NFL’s most aggressive coach on going for it on fourth down, and he continued to do that on Saturday against the Falcons, as Philadelphia scored its first touchdown on a fourth-and-goal run. It’s surprising that other coaches haven’t caught on to the fact that going for it on fourth down is the right call far more often than the vast majority of them realize. Pederson has found a big advantage for his team by going for it so often.

Antonio Brown was spectacular. Playing through the flu and a torn calf, Brown had seven catches for 132 yards and two touchdowns. One of the things I hate in the playoffs is when a good performance gets overlooked because it came in a losing effort. Brown was the best player on the field against the Jaguars, even though the Steelers fell short.