Karma & Brett

No NFL team is better prepared for the cold than the Green Bay Packers. But for them, the biggest challenge this season has been enduring the whether:

Whether quarterback Brett Favre was the same kind of player he was in his late 20s, when he was chosen the NFL’s most valuable player three consecutive seasons.

Whether Mike Sherman was overmatched in his dual role as coach and general manager.

And whether the team could handle the undulations of a trying season, one colored by tragedy and some peculiar twists of fate.

“It’s been a very strange year,” said Bob Harlan, president of the Packers, who will play at Philadelphia on Sunday in an NFC divisional playoff game. “We’ve definitely matured as a team.”

If so, they have grown the hard way. The team has had to deal with two tragedies in the last eight months: the death of 14-year-old Ray Sherman Jr., son of the Packers’ offensive coordinator, who fatally shot himself in May with his father’s handgun; and the death last month of Irvin Favre, Brett’s father, who suffered a heart attack while driving his pickup truck near his home in Kiln, Miss.

The day after his father’s death, in a Monday night game at Oakland, Brett Favre momentarily set aside his anguish and played one of the best games of his career. He made his 205th consecutive start -- an NFL record for quarterbacks -- and threw for 399 yards and four touchdowns in a 41-7 rout.

Even after that victory, the Packers teetered on the verge of elimination, staying in that precarious position until the final week of the season, when they won the NFC North by virtue of Arizona’s upset of Minnesota. That game was decided on the last play, a leaping 28-yard touchdown catch by Nathan Poole for an 18-17 victory by the Cardinals.

That stunning ending, coupled with Green Bay’s overtime victory over Seattle in a first-round playoff game Sunday, has only strengthened the belief of some that the Packers are not only the sentimental favorite in the playoff field but this season’s team of destiny.

A supernatural Super Bowl pick? Get real, says Sherman, who isn’t related to Ray Sherman. In his Monday news conference after the Packers beat the Seahawks, the coach interrupted a reporter who was asking about running back Ahman Green’s going a month without fumbling.

“I thought you were going to say it was magical,” Sherman said. “That word has been bandied about quite often here.”

Sherman, Harlan and many of the players say the Packers’ recent success is about good chemistry, not good karma.

“I do believe in divine intervention,” Sherman said. “Now, whether it’s in football or not; I think there’s a lot of homeless people who are probably reliant and need divine intervention more than a football team. But I do believe in that ... and we’ll take whatever we can get.”

The Packers feel good about the way they match up against the Eagles, but they will need to break a historic trend to win at Philadelphia. Since the league expanded its playoff field to 12 teams in 1990, the NFC’s top two seeds in the divisional rounds are 24-2, with the only losers being the 2001 Bears and 1995 49ers.

The Eagles have a huge advantage over Green Bay in that they got a week to rest, vital for a team that has been plagued by injuries.

Naturally, Sherman looked at the bright side when asked about it Monday.

“I guess it depends on where you’re sitting,” he said. “If I had the bye, I’d be saying the bye is the way to go. But now that we won a playoff game in very emotional fashion, I like the energy of that. So it just depends on where you’re sitting and how it’s working for you.”

It’s impossible to measure, but the Packers might have better chemistry than any team in the playoffs. Some players say the emotional connection they feel grew a lot stronger after Irvin Favre’s death and the victory over Oakland.

“We’ve had a lot of highs and lows this season, anyway,” backup quarterback Doug Pederson said. “But for us, that was a culmination of both. One day you’re as low as you can be, and the next.... Death is never good. But the bonding we’ve done the last few weeks is unlike anything I’ve ever been a part of.”

One of the reasons Harlan gave Sherman general-manager responsibilities is because he sees the coach as incredibly capable when it comes to creating good chemistry and finding personalities that mesh. Harlan said having one person handle both duties isn’t the way he would typically choose to do things -- he’s the guy who hired former general manager Ron Wolf, after all -- but he thinks Sherman is more than up for the job.

Still, the Packers are second-guessed about the decision all the time, especially when they’re going through a rough patch. By mid-October, when his team was 3-4, Harlan’s mailbox was stuffed with letters from Packer fans demanding that Sherman be stripped of at least one of his jobs.

“We’d lose a game and I’d start getting letters,” he said.

The letters slowed to a trickle as the Packers started to win. They won three of four after their week off, then dropped to 6-6 with a loss to Detroit. The Packers recovered to win their final four games to reach the playoffs.

Sunday, they play a team that also has gone through its share of tumult. The Eagles started the season 0-2 and, a lot of people believe, didn’t truly get on track until their 17-14 victory at Green Bay on Nov. 10 ,when Donovan McNabb directed a dramatic touchdown drive late in the fourth quarter. They overcame their slow start to assemble a nine-game winning streak, even as their defensive line was depleted by injuries.

As Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Bill Lyon put it: “The Eagles possess, to coin a word, ‘rootability.’ ”

The Packers understand that. They know what they’re facing. That’s why some of their players don’t cringe the way Sherman does at the suggestion they might be aided by divine intervention.

“There’s no magic out there on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday when we’re out there working hard,” Green Bay tight end Wesley Walls said. “I do believe there’s a lot of faith in each other on this team. Everyone seems to like each other. If that creates magic, or if anybody thinks that’s magic, that’s what’s good about this game. We want people to believe.”

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NFL Playoff Schedule

Seedings in parentheses. Philadelphia (1) and St. Louis (2) had byes in the first round in the NFC; New England (1) and Kansas City (2) in the AFC:

SATURDAY

NFC: Carolina (3) at St. Louis (2), 1:30 p.m., Ch. 11

AFC: Tennessee (5) at New England (1), 5:15 p.m., Ch. 2

SUNDAY

AFC: Indianapolis (3) at Kansas City (2), 10 a.m., Ch. 2

NFC: Green Bay (4) at Philadelphia (1), 1:45 p.m., Ch. 11

JAN. 18

AFC Championship game, noon, Ch. 2

NFC Championship game, 3:45 p.m., Ch. 11

FEB. 1

Super Bowl at Houston, 3:25 p.m., Ch. 2