Now that he’s in a third straight Super Bowl they want to make Patrick Mahomes into some kind of Darth Vader.

Nope. He’s Obi-Wan Mahomie.

Look, no one understands more than I do the frustration opposing fans feel at Mahomes’ domination – seven conference championship game appearances in seven years as a starter, five Super Bowls including three wins.

Since my Dad had Kansas City Chiefs season tickets in their lowly 1970s era, Chiefs fans like me had suffered 50 years’ worth of bad and mediocre football – and being featured in every other team’s highlight reels – with a few maddening close calls sprinkled in. We constantly ran into roadblocks by the name of Elway, Kelly, Rivers, Luck, Manning, Marino and, yes, Brady.

No vacancy at Heartbreak Hotel for Chiefs fans, not for half a century.

And consider this: Mahomes is the first quarterback drafted by the Chiefs in their 60-year-plus history to achieve any success at all, much less winning championships.

In short, Chiefs fans have earned, year after dreary year, what Patrick Mahomes and Coach Andy Reid and Co. have given us. We’re not going to apologize if the Force is with us for a brief time after all these years.

What they’ve given us is a quarterback who is not only arguably the best in history – and whose legacy with a win on Sunday will only be crystallized – but who is an even rarer breed of role model.

“Patrick Mahomes is mature. Patrick Mahomes is a role model,” Fox Sports’ Martin Rogers wrote in 2023. “Patrick Mahomes is a football craftsman. Patrick Mahomes is a gifted athlete. Patrick Mahomes is a future Hall of Famer. Patrick Mahomes is, almost overwhelming evidence appears to suggest, an extremely nice guy.”

With apologies to the national media, they don’t know the half of it, or what he means to the people of Kansas City. A local grocery store television commercial at the very start of Mahomes’ career here captured the essence of the young man better than anything I’ve ever seen.

Riffing on his arm strength, the commercial depicts Mahomes throwing a ball too far in his yard and ruining multiple neighbors’ barbecues. He later walks up to each house with several bags of groceries and the apology of a well-bred young man.

And that’s exactly what he is.

But he’s even more than that. He’s a devout Christian, at a time when it’s hard to find a devout anything in American culture.

“Jesus is my Lord and Savior,” he told the Super Bowl press this week. “It’s someone that I look up to every single day to decide what I want to do with my life, and how I want to live my life. Jesus is everything to me at the end of the day.”

Yet, the haters are gonna hate – like Philadelphia Eagles fans who recently told a camera how much they can’t stand No. 15. No matter his greatness, no matter his wholesomeness.

It’s the only way in which Patrick Mahomes just can’t win. What’s he supposed to do? Stop trying next year to give the other kids a chance?

“There is one reason and one reason only to cheer against Mahomes,” Rogers wrote even before Mahomes’ second championship in a row. “Quite simply, he has done too much of exactly what he is paid to do; win football games and compete successfully for championships.

“He is the guy who crushes dreams and does it with a smile on his face. The guy who takes seemingly impossible deficits and erases them in the blink of an eye. Who performs feats of athletic improbability and makes them look easy, even when he is athletically impaired.

“And who feels like the biggest individual obstacle standing in the way of your favorite team and the ultimate thrill of winning a Super Bowl.

“Envy? Absolutely.

“Being petty and jealous and unreasonable is part of the enjoyment of being a football fan.”

Maybe. But it’s incredibly unfair. And completely counter to the truth – which is that Patrick Mahomes is quite likely the best player-and-person combination the sporting world has ever seen.

“I really don’t know how anyone can hate this guy,” writes Lexi Osborne of The Kingdom’s Queens podcast covering the Chiefs. “Just a kind hearted man and loves the game he plays. So grateful for this ride we’re on with Patrick Mahomes. ❤️💛”

Chiefs fans lived for decades in the shadow of other dynasties.

We won’t be denied our Obi-Wan.