Chiefs Fatigue is real thing, and it’s bigger than Taylor Swift

You can blame Taylor Swift if you want, that’s fine. She was already everywhere you turned, and now she’s on your television in the sacred space of professional football games. That’s fair.

You can blame Patrick Mahomes, or, more specifically, the fact that his wife, Brittany, squeezes into every camera shot Taylor’s in — which means she’s also on your TV more than Dr. Rick trying to prevent young homeowners from becoming their parents. Also fair.

Heck, around here, if you’re a Giants fan who can’t stand that Kadarius Toney is maybe 60 minutes away from winning a second Super Bowl ring, or a Jets fan bemused that Mecole Hardman is that close to winning a third … sure, it’s understandable that you might be tired of the Kansas City Chiefs.

Here’s the thing, though.

If Chiefs Fatigue is a Thing — and outside of Missouri and Kansas and the legion of fantasy-team owners for whom regularly drafting Mahomes has meant consistently finishing in the money, it is 100 percent a Thing — the best explanation is also the easiest explanation, and in many ways the single most complimentary thing you can ever say about a team or an athlete.

They’re just good.

They’re too damned good.

Just think about the status the Kansas City Chiefs held in your life five years ago. The Chiefs were, on many levels, the mirror image of their old AFL compadres, the Jets. They both won championships within a year of each other early in the Super Bowl Era, then experienced matching decades of ineptitude with occasional spasms of hope.

But even those pockets of prosperity were rife with peril. Making the playoffs for the Jets only meant collecting scars like the Mud Bowl, Gastineau roughing Bernie Kosar, Doug Brien, L.T. at the goal line.

The Chiefs? Three times they went 13-3 with the No. 1 seed and lost their first home playoff game. In 2014, they blew a 38-10 third-quarter lead to the Colts in the playoffs. That game was one of eight straight playoffs games they lost across a 25-year stretch.

If you felt anything at all toward the Chiefs it was maybe — maybe — empathy. And if you’re a Jets fan, perhaps solidarity.

And now … well, they can’t lose. They won’t lose. Two years ago, despite having just 13 seconds to tie in regulation, they won in overtime. The first game of this remarkable title-happy run under Mahomes, the Chiefs spotted the Texans a 24-0 lead … and still won by 20 points. Their two Super Bowl wins, they trailed in the fourth quarter both times, shrugged, came back.

Maybe most egregiously, they went on the road the past two weeks, significant underdogs in both games, and took great delight in breaking the hearts of fanatical Buffalo fans and breaking the spirits of frenzied Baltimore fans. And thus, the Chiefs arrived at the most egregious intersection in sports.

The cross-pollination of legitimate dominance and the faint fuel of nobody-believes-in-us. And when you achieve that — and you mix in Taylor, and you mix in Mrs. Mahomes, and you mix in whatever personal grievances you may have collected on the side …

That’s a recipe for fatigue.

Chiefs Fatigue.

And look, maybe the Chiefs are aggrieved by this, and maybe their army of loyal fans is aggravated by this, but it’s actually the highest form of flattery allowed. The NBA’s Warriors not only experienced this, they perfected it. The Patriots copyrighted it. The Yankees trademarked it. Duke basketball still dines on it. The Cowboys may have invented it, even if hardly anyone on earth is still alive who remembers why.

John McEnroe and Jimmy Connors, Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova and Serena Williams, they all experienced it — though in solo sports there is usually time at the back end to enjoy the flip side, the get-behind-the-legend-on-the-way-out run. We can call that the Jack Nicklaus/Tiger Woods/Anika Sorenstam Theorem.

In truth, it’s so rare that a player or a team that reaches that level of governance is spared the accompanying rancor, it almost defies explanation. You never heard anyone boo Roger Federer, for instance. Though outliers in New York and Detroit and Indianapolis may disagree, it seems the Jordan-era Bulls were mostly revered and never reviled. If anyone truly actively rooted against the Lombardi Packers, that seems to have been lost to the mist of time.

This will pass, too. The Patriots are learning just how dull life is on the other side of being hated. The Mets have been pitied for so long it’s hard to remember that for six or seven solid years there may not have ever been a more disliked franchise.

The Chiefs will go away at some point. Andy Reid will retire. Mahomes will grow old. There will be a string of 6-11s and 5-12s somewhere in their future. That’s for then.

For now? The Chiefs have apparently done what ought to be impossible: They’ve got perfectly neutral and otherwise normal fans rooting for San Francisco, which has spent entire recent decades stubbornly perfecting the state of Niners Fatigue.