Cheesehead
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- Mar 19, 2019
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The perfect ending
Temperatures hovered near freezing as Aaron Rodgers knelt down to close a monstrous 6-minute, 44-second drive. Now, it was up to Mason to drill a game-winning kick with two seconds left and complete a comeback one year in the making.
It was a relatively simple kick, especially in comparison to everything the Crosby family had been through over the prior months. But yet it felt so far from where Molly was seated.
With Molly watching from that same end zone, time stood still as long snapper Hunter Bradley delivered the ball to holder JK Scott and Mason drilled it through the uprights from 23 yards away to the roar of the Lambeau Field crowd.
One year after missing five kicks against the Lions, Crosby made all five of his attempts (three field goals, two extra points) to seal Green Bay's 23-22 comeback victory to improve to 5-1.
"When he kicked that thing through, her face – you could tell," Laura Hawk said. "I know she was exhausted. I know her body was telling her I need to go to bed. It was so late and you could see her whole self just lit up, and she was so thankful for being there.
"It was the greatest moment and it was such a beautiful ending to this perfect story of recovery and survival. It couldn't have been in a book or in a movie. It could not have ended more perfectly than that."
It had been a recurring joke that Mason, the second-longest tenured player on the roster behind Rodgers, had never performed a Lambeau Leap before.
It was the veteran kicker's contention that only a long, game-winning field goal would be worthy of the honor. Even then, he'd have to run down the field to do it and that seemed anticlimactic.
Scott and Bradley disagreed. After Mason nailed the kick against the Lions, the two specialists ushered him to the stands with Bradley helping lift him into the crowd. An emotional Molly cheered on Mason from above.
"I'm just so proud of the fight and the woman that she is," Mason said. "We joked now, after the fact, I should've seen if I could've gotten the fans to like crowd surf me up and I could've gotten all the way up and given her a hug."
Despite all the adversity, Mason had the best season of his career in 2019. He made 22-of-24 field goals to tie Jan Stenarud's franchise record for single-season accuracy (91.7%).
It was the perfect opportunity for the franchise's all-time leading scorer to test the waters in unrestricted free agency. But after talking things through with Molly, Mason made it known there was only one place he wanted to work and officially re-signed with the Packers on 2-22-2020.
"How do you leave the people who held your hand? And brought meals? And picked up your kids? And did so much more. It made it impossible," Molly said. "What more could you ever ask for? Because we feel like it's such a special place filled with special people and the organization is second to none.
"You have to take a second and just look at the blessings and realize the grass is never going to be any greener than Green Bay."
As Mason moves into his 14th season in Green Bay, this past year has crystallized the reasons behind his and Molly's longstanding partnership with the Vince Lombardi Cancer Foundation and why it's important to continue funding cancer research, especially after Molly's adopted father, Dan, was diagnosed with bladder cancer in January.
Molly was deemed cancer free during a checkup right before the country went into a lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Her next appointment is scheduled for this week, a biannual process that'll continue for the next four years.
If cancer taught Molly anything, it's to appreciate today. She quotes a line from the Richard A. Swenson book "A Minute of Margin," in saying not to live "in the tyranny of the urgent."
There was time when her life revolved around whether the laundry was finished, but no longer. Instead, she values the time she has with Mason and her kids because those are precious moments you can't get back.
In September, Mason and Molly got a box of butterflies for their five kids and released them together as a family in memory of Aunt Brittany. While Brittany no longer is here with them, her mantra of living life to the fullest is something the entire Crosby family carries with them.
"Every once in a while, I would say maybe once a day, I take a breath for some reason and I just get tears in my eyes, just so thankful breathing doesn't hurt," Molly said.
"Cancer puts this very healthy pressure on me to be spending my days the right way. I'm not guaranteed anything. If I don't get past this day, am I good with how I spent it? It sounds like every country song you've ever heard … but (cancer) took it out of my head and put it into something I could do."