ATLANTA — Think about what it had to have been like to be Colin Kaepernick all week. Think about the adulation he carried around on his shoulders and in his ears, in the wake of his superhuman, virtuoso performance in the 49ers’ win over the Packers last Saturday night.
That was the beginning of the week, when it looked as if he would be trapped in a Truman Show-style bubble, all Kap, all the time.
Yet by week’s end he somehow had become even more important to the national narrative. In a week of Lance Armstrong’s endless arrogance and Manti Te’o’s ceaseless naivete, we kept coming back to Kaepernick as a reminder of why we put up with all of sports’ dark corners, a reminder of what the payoff can be.
“It’s a good thing you think of stuff like that, so he doesn’t have to,” Kaepernick’s wing man, running back Frank Gore, said with a laugh. “All he cares about is playing football. And, damn, he plays it well, doesn’t he?”
Yes, he does. He plays it well and he plays it according to the data of the day, not any preconceived narrative of who he is, of what he’s supposed to be. A week after keeping the ball 16 times and gaining 181 rushing yards and seemingly announcing to the world that a new-style quarterback was on the prowl — RG III 2.0? — something interesting happened.
He carried the ball twice. Yes. Twice. The first time he lost two yards. The second time he gained 23. And that was … that was it. He kept stuffing it in Gore’s belly. Kept finding wide-open receivers and drilling them in the hands and numbers with textbook spiral fastballs. Kept the Falcons so paranoid that this would be the time he went with the keeper they could think of little else.
“I don’t want to be categorized,” Kaepernick said.
“He can do whatever he wants,” Gore interjected.
And this morning, it’s hard to argue. On almost every level, this splendid 28-24 victory in the NFC Championship Game was 180 degrees different than what the Niners had done to Green Bay last week. Then, at home, San Francisco got a lead and sprinted away from the Pack, essentially telling Kaepernick to have a hell of a time along the way, do it all himself.
This time, the Niners found themselves behind 17-0, with a hostile Georgia Dome crowd fixing to melt the ceiling with its voice and its volatility. The Falcons were going to make damn sure Kaepernick wasn’t going to posterize them as he had the Packers. They saw what the nation saw last week.
And then they saw something else.
Saw an entirely different quarterback. A patient one, a relentlessly professional one, conducting himself as if this were his ninth career NFC Championship Game, not his ninth career start.
Again, think about how easily his mind could have been spinning, how tempting it must have been, especially down 17, to try to take things into his own hands, to try to make a play, make something out of nothing. Yet time after time, with the Falcons braced to swarm him if he kept the ball in his hands, he let it go: handing it to Gore, slinging it to Michael Crabtree and Vernon Davis.
Patiently slicing away at the lead, until suddenly the Georgia Dome was church-still and the numbers on the scoreboard were Niners-friendly. It wouldn’t be Kaepernick who would throw a killer pick, who would fumble a shotgun snap, who would play timidly from the shadow of his own goal line after benefitting from a huge break. That was Matt Ryan, Matty Ice, who shrank more and more as the game got closer to its sweaty stage.
The exact time Kaepernick seemed to exchange his football jersey for a sweater with an “S” on the front.
“He’s a competitor,” 49ers coach Jim Harbaugh said, “and he’s tough, the way so many of our guys are tough.”
And if you wanted to dismiss him as a byproduct of either a smart offensive coach or a quirky system or his own eclectic gifts? Do so at your own peril. Categorize him at your own risk.
michael.vaccaro@nypost.com