“Dude,” he was saying to Taylor Decker as he walked into the locker room inside Ford Field on Sunday evening, “we’re playing in the NFC championship.”

If Frank Ragnow can’t believe it?

How can you?

Ragnow spoke for thousands when he marveled at where the Detroit Lions are with his buddy on the offensive line. The Lions are a game away from the Super Bowl, and even now, a day later, it still somehow doesn’t seem real.

But it is.

It’s too deep not to be. Monumental, even. In fact, it’s hard to overstate what this team means to this place, our place, and harder still to overstate what this run is doing.

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Dan Campbell understands. He has from the start. As it happened, Sunday was the three-year anniversary of his "biting kneecaps" speech. He was asked about it after his Lions knocked off Tampa, 31-23, to earn a spot in the NFC title game in San Francisco on Sunday, and he answered as you’d expect:

“Look, I’ve got a lot of really, really outstanding people around me and I’m fortunate. I’m fortunate. And it takes a village, and without everybody involved ...”

And, well, you get the idea. Of course, he was going to make it about those around him. It’s what he does, and what he believes. And what he has gotten his team to believe.

And when he talked about biting kneecaps, his overall philosophy got lost, about how he wanted to coach, about what he thinks makes a team in the NFL. He sees it in this team:

“They love football, they play football and that’s what they respect, and they respect their teammates and not anything else. And when you’re able to care more about the person next to you than your own — about yourself, you can do some pretty special things and that’s where we’re at with this group.”

He could be talking about anything in life; the whole works better when one person is thinking about the next.

Football is our most communal sport. It’s also the most physically demanding. Absorbing and flushing pain is essential to playing it, and it’s easier to survive that pain together. This is Campbell’s fundamental formula. It’s not especially unique, but it is rarer than you think.

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Mantras are easy to say and hard to make real. This is Campbell’s gift. He was asked what he saw when he took the job, and he didn’t hesitate:

“I envisioned that we would have a chance to compete with the big boys, and that’s where we’re at. All you’ve got to do is get in, and it’s about placing yourself in the very best position to where you can move. You get a home game and then maybe you get a second home game, and now all of a sudden it gets a little easier. If you’re able to get a 1-seed, you’ve only got to win two games. And so, that’s always the objective. But ultimately, once you get in, then it’s about matchups and you find a way to win and you may have to win 2-0 and it’s OK. It’s OK. A win’s a win in the playoffs. So, here we are and now we get to go to San Francisco, and we know what kind of team that is, but we’re in a great position. We’ve got a great opportunity.”

For years, this town waited for a coach and a general manager to do what Campbell and Brad Holmes have just done. They identified players they wanted. They drafted them. They’ve coached them up and built them up.

Now they are here, on the edge of the biggest game in American sports, a game the Lions have obviously never reached, a game the Lions have only come this close to once, back in 1991 — but then I don’t need to remind you of that.

Campbell’s Lions are here because they’re talented, clearly. And because they play for one another — no good football team doesn’t. Yet when he talks about his guys playing for something larger than themselves, he isn’t just talking about the team, or about playing for the guy in the next locker.

He’s talking about you, about playing for you, which is to say his team has connected with this city, and this region, and that this kind of connection matters, too.

“I think it’s important. I mean, you can’t — I don’t know if it’s — it’s not the first thing you think of if you go to L.A. or just in general,” he said. “You’ve got the sun, you’ve got the beach, you’ve got plenty of other things going on. And here, man, it’s harsh winters, auto industry, blue collar, things aren’t always here. And I just think, that’s what we’re about.”

And?

“And that ... you want something the city can be proud of. You can look at those guys and say, ‘Man, I can back that guy. I can back that team. I can resonate with those group of guys. They’re kind of salty. They don’t quit. They play hard.’ And so, I feel like we’ve done that.”

This is hard to overstate, too. It’s also hard to quantify, to make tangible. But you know it when you see it and know it when you feel it.

Campbell sees it. Feels it. And when he says he knows the community sees it and feels it back, he is stating a fact. He isn’t bragging.

“These guys ... they have a kinship with this city and this area, and they love it, man. And ultimately, that’s what you want. Now, a year from now, two years, we’ll be getting booed maybe, that’s a whole other deal though. But right now, life’s good and I’m glad we could deliver that.”

As Ragnow said, Dude.

Contact Shawn Windsor: 313-222-6487 or swindsor@freepress.com. Follow him @shawnwindsor

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Dan Campbell gets it, as do the Detroit Lions headed to NFC title game