Joe Burrow’s Last Playoff Loss Was in High School. He Still Thinks About It.

THE PLAINS, Ohio — When the final lateral had failed, the last tackle had been secured and the clock had hit zero, Joe Burrow yanked off his gold Athens High School helmet and dropped to the Ohio Stadium turf. All around him, Toledo Central Catholic football players stormed onto the field, celebrating a heart-thumping, roller-coaster ride of a state championship victory. The final score: Central Catholic 56, Athens 52.

In the chaos, Central Catholic middle linebacker Zach Sandwisch caught sight of Burrow.

For the entire night, Sandwisch had relentlessly stalked Burrow, chasing him out of the pocket and pounding him repeatedly on blitzes — only to watch Burrow shrug off trouble and coolly deliver one downfield dart after another.

“I look over, and it’s just Joe sitting there,” said Sandwisch, who walked over and bent down to talk to Burrow, a gesture that was captured in a photo that the state athletic association has used to promote sportsmanship.

“I said, ‘Hey, keep your head up,’” Sandwisch said. “He played his butt off, and I wanted him to know that someone noticed that. It wasn’t him losing. We just came out on top. I told him there were going to be bigger opportunities in his life to showcase everything.”

That was more than seven years ago.

Sandwisch, who played football at West Virginia University and is now an ironworker in Toledo, could not have been more prescient. Burrow won a college national championship and a Heisman Trophy as a quarterback at Louisiana State. Now, less than two years after the Cincinnati Bengals made him the top overall pick in the N.F.L. draft, he has led the N.F.L. franchise to its first appearance in a Super Bowl since the 1988 season. The Bengals will play the Los Angeles Rams on Sunday.

That Division III state championship game, held Dec. 4, 2014, showcased so many of the qualities that Burrow has shown off on a bigger stage — his cool confidence, determined toughness, slippery elusiveness, exquisite footwork and precise touch.

But that game is notable for another reason. It was the last time Burrow lost a playoff game.

He won the Southeastern Conference championship game and two College Football Playoff games in his final season with Louisiana State. (The previous season, his first as a starter after transferring from Ohio State, he won a bowl game.)

Torn knee ligaments ended his rookie N.F.L. season early, and he won three playoff games last month to reach the Super Bowl.

On some level, though, Burrow is not yet over that long-ago loss, which he called at the time “the worst day of my life.” That emotion has softened only slightly since then.

“Oh man, I think about that game all the time,” Burrow said Wednesday at a news conference. “We were so close and playing a group of friends our entire childhood up to that point. It was kind of a culmination of a lot of hard work and time that we put in together, and we just didn’t get the job done.”

He added, “That state championship in high school is going to be the one that eluded me.”

To understand why the loss cut so deeply, it is important to understand how Burrow and his teammates saw the game: as a real-life “Hoosiers” with an ending gone wrong, where Jimmy Chitwood can’t get off the last shot.

The boys from Athens High School, which had never won a playoff game before Burrow’s sophomore season, were playing for all the schools in the rural Appalachian foothills of southeast Ohio, the poorest region of the state, where football players could only dream of a chance against one of the state’s private school powerhouses.

When the team buses pulled away from the school that Thursday and turned right onto State Road 682 to begin the trip to Columbus, people lined the side of the road with signs encouraging the Bulldogs. The caravan took a wide detour through the town of Glouster, where rivals from Trimble High School greeted the team with firetrucks flashing their lights and well-wishers ringing cowbells.

“When you’re 17, you think the world is that small — we’re Athens, you’re Trimble,” said Tyler Bailey, a senior then who played right guard and who answers to the nickname Catfish. “It’s almost like I can relive it in the third person, looking out the window of that Greyhound bus.

“I remember the gravity around our football team,” he continued. “As a high school athlete, you talk about playing for the name on the front — what does that mean? It was the first time I had a firsthand experience of something that was bigger than the collective team.”

Bailey, now an accountant in Cleveland, said his second-place medal hangs by itself in his bedroom closet so that he sees it every day. “I’m not proud of a state runner-up medal at all,” he said. “I’m proud of the person that looks at that medal every day.”

Zacciah Saltzman, a junior receiver who caught eight passes in the game, including a 29-yard touchdown, said he was still sour about the loss. In a game that had innumerable pivot points almost down to the final play — missed extra points, penalties, circus catches, balls glancing off fingertips and mano-a-mano matchups — the what-ifs inevitably linger.

“It bothers all of us — like, damn, we were right there,” said Saltzman, who played at Georgetown and now works for a wealth management company in Columbus.

“I think for Joe it’s going to be interesting,” Saltzman said. “He won in college, he’s going to win in the N.F.L. and I know how Joe is — that’s going to bug him. He’s going to look back at this, ‘Man, I lost the state championship.’”

It was clear last weekend how vivid — and in some cases, raw — the memories remained for the grown-ups, too. On Saturday, Nathan White, then the offensive coordinator and now the head coach at Athens High School, sat in his classroom where he teaches math and watched the game tape of the title game — explaining his play calls, the formations and why he looked so drained after watching the game as intently as he ever had. The next day, Greg Dempsey, the coach at Central Catholic, went through a similar exercise 215 miles to the north — ensconced in the coaches’ office and coming back to the same word White used to describe one turn after another in the game: gut-wrenching.

“Everything about that game felt like it was 100 miles per hour,” White said.

“It was one of those games that got better as it went,” Dempsey said. “Every play mattered.”

The old boxing maxim — styles make fights — held true that night, beginning when the teams walked wide-eyed into the old horseshoe, Ohio State’s cavernous stadium, where the state championship games were being held for the first time in 25 years.

At one end was Central Catholic, which drew players from all over Toledo and was gunning for its third state title in a decade. About 90 players suited up and began to stretch. “It looked like a Big Ten pregame,” White said. At the other end, Athens had just over 40 players — most of them with bleached blond hair.

Earlier in the season, someone had suggested that if the Bulldogs won the regional final — where they were stopped the previous two seasons — they should dye their hair blond. So days after the win, a salon in downtown Athens dyed the players’ hair at no cost. “It started out as a joke, but we had to go through with it,” said Bryce Graves, a linebacker who now manages a bar in Dublin, Ohio, just north of Columbus. “My hair was short, so when I grew it out I had frosted tips for a couple months.”

The hair wasn’t the only curiosity about Athens. Days before, Burrow had been named the state’s Mr. Football and had a scholarship offer to Ohio State. And though Athens had rallied to beat the defending champion St. Vincent-St. Mary High School of Akron, 34-31, on a late Burrow-to-Saltzman pass in the semifinals, Burrow also had a viral moment a week earlier — catching his own deflected pass and running it in for a touchdown in the regional final.

“That play was going around the locker room,” said James Hudson III, a sophomore lineman at Central Catholic who now plays for the Cleveland Browns and reminds Burrow when they see each other that he sacked the quarterback in the fourth quarter of the game. “I’m going, ‘Who is this dude Joe Burrow?’”

He quickly found out.

On the third play of the game, Central Catholic came with an all-out blitz. As one lineman held Burrow around the leg, Sandwisch had a clear shot to level him. Instead, the hit bounced Burrow loose, and he bolted out of the pocket for a 49-yard run to within a couple feet of the goal line.

The chirping from the Central Catholic defense, which had started in warm-ups, ceased.

“You’re thinking, ‘All right, Joe Burrow ain’t nothing,’” Marcus Winters, the Central Catholic quarterback, remembered thinking as he stood on the sideline. “He makes that play and now I could see why…