TWO SECONDS.
FIFTY-EIGHT YARDS.
It was the New Orleans Saints’ first game of the 2019 season against the Houston Texans on “Monday Night Football,” and with two ticks left on the clock, Wil Lutz had to make the longest field goal of his career to win the game.
By every metric, Lutz is one of the best kickers in the NFL. He makes nearly 90 percent of his field goal attempts and owns the Saints’ franchise record for kicking 26 in a row. Not only is he accurate, he’s got range — Lutz has missed only three kicks of more than 50 yards in the past two seasons.
But one of those was at the end of the first half of that Monday Night game when his 56-yard try sailed wide to the left.
“We talked at halftime, and I told him, ‘You’ll get another shot,’” says Thomas Morstead, the Saints punter and the holder for Lutz’s field goal and extra point attempts.
Lutz did, and there was no doubt from the moment his right foot walloped the ball that his kick was good. Even before it cruised through the uprights, Morstead spun around and rushed his kicker, teammate and friend. The Mercedes-Benz Superdome erupted as the Saints poured onto the field and swarmed him.
“We knew going onto the field that he was going to make that kick,” Morstead says. “We just knew.”
That was how Wil Lutz, a former walk-on player at Georgia State who went undrafted in the NFL, began his first Pro-Bowl season.
It was the New Orleans Saints’ first game of the 2019 season against the Houston Texans on “Monday Night Football,” and with two ticks left on the clock, Wil Lutz had to make the longest field goal of his career to win the game.
By every metric, Lutz is one of the best kickers in the NFL. He makes nearly 90 percent of his field goal attempts and owns the Saints’ franchise record for kicking 26 in a row. Not only is he accurate, he’s got range — Lutz has missed only three kicks of more than 50 yards in the past two seasons.
But one of those was at the end of the first half of that Monday Night game when his 56-yard try sailed wide to the left.
“We talked at halftime, and I told him, ‘You’ll get another shot,’” says Thomas Morstead, the Saints punter and the holder for Lutz’s field goal and extra point attempts.
Lutz did, and there was no doubt from the moment his right foot walloped the ball that his kick was good. Even before it cruised through the uprights, Morstead spun around and rushed his kicker, teammate and friend. The Mercedes-Benz Superdome erupted as the Saints poured onto the field and swarmed him.
“We knew going onto the field that he was going to make that kick,” Morstead says. “We just knew.”
That was how Wil Lutz, a former walk-on player at Georgia State who went undrafted in the NFL, began his first Pro-Bowl season.
—
In spring 2012, a skinny kid with braces on his teeth walked into the Georgia State football team’s locker room. Bill Curry, then the team’s coach and himself an NFL Pro-Bowler, eyeballed the kid and asked, “And who are you?”
“I’m your kicker, coach,” Wil responded, smiling.
“He looked like he was about 13 years old,” Curry remembers. “But then we saw him kick. There was a different sound when he kicked the ball. It wasn’t hard to see that he had the raw ingredients to be great, but what we didn’t know then was how hard he works.”
Wil grew up playing soccer and didn’t start playing football until his junior year at Northgate High School in Newnan, Ga. His older brother, Wesley (B.A. ’14), also a soccer player, was approached by the school’s football coach, Tommy Walburn, to kick for the football team.
“Being the little brother, I always wanted to be better,” Wil says. “So, when they asked him to kick, I wanted to do it, too. That’s how it all started.”
Wesley, academy director of the Southern Soccer Academy in Atlanta and a former coach with the women’s and men’s soccer teams at Georgia State, is two years older than Wil.
“He wanted [to be the kicker], you could tell,” Wesley says. “He won the job as a junior and was also the team’s punter his senior year.”
Wesley and Wil are the sons of educators. Their father, Bob, is a middle-school science teacher and taught both of his sons when they were eighth-graders.
“Dad gave Wesley his first B,” Wil remembers. “That was a weird report card day.”
Their mother, Julie, was Wil’s elementary school principal. She’s now dean and associate professor of education at Truett McConnell University in Cleveland, Ga.
“Wil was a mess of a kid,” Julie says. “He sees something he wants to do, and he jumps in both feet- and head-first. That’s how he’s been his whole life.”
There was no slacking in the Lutz household when it came to the boys’ schoolwork.
“Looking back, I really appreciate it,” Wil says, “but if you asked me when I was in middle or high school, I would’ve said something totally different.”
The Saints mob Wil Lutz after his game-winning 58-yard field goal, the longest of his career, beat the Texans 30-28.
— Photo by Butch Dill / Associated Press
At Georgia State, Wil was on the Athletic Director’s Honor Roll as a criminal justice major and, if football didn’t pan out, he planned to go to law school. Julie says that, though he usually came home with good grades, juggling academics and athletics was tough.
“We were pretty hard on him, but he’s a hard worker and always has been,” she says. “If he didn’t do well on a test or on the field, he would take it as a challenge. He was the kind of kid — and now, he’s the kind of man — who says, ‘OK, I’ll show you.’”
Based on his stats, Wil wasn’t a great kicker in high school (“I was a strong-legged soccer player learning how to kick a football,” he says), but Curry’s coaching staff was intrigued by his potential — just not enough to give him a full ride. Wil was offered scholarships from a handful of smaller schools, but he chose to walk on at Georgia State to prove he could play Division I football.
He started his freshman season as the team’s kickoff specialist, a position tailor-made for a guy who can boot the ball a mile. Four games in, he took over all placekicking duties. He was perfect on all his extra point attempts and only missed two field goals, both from long range at 48 and 54 yards.
He earned his scholarship as a sophomore and kicked his first 50-plus yard field goal — a school-record 53-yarder against No. 1 Alabama (the only points the Panthers scored that day). Halfway through his junior year, just like in high school, he took over as the team’s punter.
“That actually turned out to be one of the best things that ever happened to me because it showed [NFL] teams that I could handle all three kicking duties,” Lutz says.
Going into his senior season, it was Wil Lutz the punter who was an all-conference selection and a preseason nominee for the Ray Guy Award, given to the nation’s best at the position.
He finished his college career as Georgia State’s leader in games played, field goals and extra points made, and overall points scored. That kick in Tuscaloosa, Ala., against the Crimson Tide still stands as the longest in program history.
“When he made that kick, a guy we know turned to us and said, ‘That’s what he’ll be known for,’” Julie remembers. “I saw that guy not too long ago, and said, ‘Well, he’s known for a lot more than that one kick now, isn’t he?”
Wil holds the NFL record for consecutive field goals made on the road. He’s pretty good at home, too. Last season, he made 20 field goals in the Mercedes-Benz Superdome.
Wil holds the NFL record for consecutive field goals made on the road. He’s pretty good at home, too. Last season, he made 20 field goals in the Mercedes-Benz Superdome.
—
Wil wasn’t selected in the 2016 NFL Draft.
“He really didn’t know if he’d make it to the NFL,” says Julie. “He even got a dog.” (Cooper, a Catahoula, currently lives with Julie and Bob and wears a Saints doggy jersey during Wil’s games.)
But his versatility — the ability to send a kickoff deep into the end zone, kick field goals as well as punt — interested NFL general managers, and he received a handful of training camp invitations.
“I had what they call a ‘camp leg,’” Wil says. “I was basically the guy NFL teams want to bring in during training camp so their starters can rest.”
That spring, Wil made an extraordinary decision. He signed with the Baltimore Ravens, a team with one of the league’s best field goal kickers, Justin Tucker, entrenched as the starter. Wil knew his odds of making an NFL roster were slim, so he picked Baltimore, an organization known for prioritizing its special teams and developing special teams’ players.
“Why not go to a place where I can learn from the best?” he says.
Wil processed everything during training camp and soaked up the experience like a sponge. He played so well during the preseason that Ravens coach John Harbaugh hoped another team would try to trade for him.
“It was like, I knew I didn’t belong, but while I’m here, I’m going to take advantage of every opportunity,” Wil says.
Then the Ravens cut him after the third preseason game.
“He called, said he was coming home and moved in with me the next day,” Wesley remembers. “He thought that might be it, so he started working with the equipment staff at Georgia State.”
His campus job lasted a week. Wil was invited to work out for the New Orleans Saints — a team with an unsettled kicking situation. It was his performance in Baltimore that led to the opportunity. Harbaugh, the Ravens coach, was so impressed with the rookie that he urged his friend, Saints coach Sean Payton, to give him a look.
After his audition with the Saints, Payton told the media that Wil had “probably the best kicking workout I’ve ever seen.”
“When Wil called me that time around, he said he wasn’t coming home,” Wesley says.
The Saints cut two veteran kickers on their roster before the regular season started, clearing the way for him.
Charlie Cobb, Georgia State’s athletics director, who remains close with Wil, says his decision to hone his craft during that training camp in Baltimore was a masterstroke.
“I mean, what hopeful NFL player thinks to do something like that? He knew he wasn’t going to walk in and beat out Justin Tucker. But guess what? He learned, he got better and he blew them away,” Cobb says. “And that led to his opportunity with the Saints.”
Since signing with the Saints, Wil has become one of the most reliable kickers in one of the most high-pressure jobs in professional sports.
In 2018, he made 28 of his 30 field goal attempts and 52 out of 53 extra points. This past March, the Saints rewarded him with a five-year contract extension that made him the league’s highest-paid kicker at the time.
This past season, Wil was second in the league in points scored, third in field goals made and he set an NFL record by making 35 straight kicks on the road. He was named to his first Pro Bowl and took his family to the game in Orlando, Fla.
“We didn’t get to see much of him because he was so busy,” Julie says, “but to see all of these NFL stars and people wanting his autograph … I was one proud mama.”
His head coach back at Georgia State is proud, too. Curry says he and his wife, Carolyn (M.A. ’79, Ph.D. ’87), watch as many of his games as they can and keep a running count of his field goals.
“He’s a great kicker and a great young man,” Curry says. “You don’t get great because of natural ability. You get great because you’re willing to spend more hours working on your skill than other people.
“And that son of a gun kicks ’em right down the middle.”
FLOWN THE COOP
WIL LUTZ IS AN ATLANTA FALCONS FAN NO MORE
“My buddies give me a hard time, but I’ve truly embraced the New Orleans legacy of hating the Falcons,” says Lutz, who grew up a Falcons fan and played all his collegiate home games in the Georgia Dome, the Falcons' home until 2017.
Going into this season, his career-long field goal was a 57-yarder against the Falcons in the Mercedes-Benz Superdome.
“All of my family and friends were there,” Lutz says of the kick during his rookie year. “That was a big moment for me. I always have a lot of motivation in those games. Knock on wood, I’m 22 for 22 against Atlanta.”
—
Wil has put roots down in the Big Easy. He just bought a house on a leafy, live oak–lined street in New Orleans’ historic Garden District, and he met his fiancée, Megan Fox, a Florida native, in New Orleans three years ago. Last summer, he flew her parents and a handful of her friends to town before he dropped to a knee and proposed to her atop the Ponchartrain Hotel.
“We love the good food, the parades, and we’ve really gotten into the culture here,” he says.
Last Mardi Gras, he rode on a leopard-spotted chariot in the “Krewe of Bacchus” parade, and he and Megan are a regular sight at the city’s restaurants, events and festivals.
The couple are active in the community and volunteer with two of his teammates’ charitable foundations: Morstead’s “What You Give Will Grow,” which helps children battling cancer, and the “Brees Dream Foundation,” future Hall of Fame quarterback Drew Brees’ charity that helps improve the quality of life for cancer patients and provides assistance for the needy.
“The first time I met Drew, I called him ‘sir,’” Wil says, laughing. “He’s one of those guys who I get to share the locker room with who I grew up idolizing.”
Lutz and Morstead, also a fellow college walk-on, have forged a particularly close friendship. The two, along with snapper Zach Wood, work closely together as a symbiotic operation — snap-hold-kick, snap-hold-kick — on thousands of repetitions in order to make those 58-yarders when a game is on the line.
“I consider Wil a close friend, and I’m excited for his future on and off the field,” Morstead says.
Wil is also one of the Georgia State Alumni Association’s 40 Under 40 for 2020, a list of the most influential and innovative graduates under the age of 40. It’s an honor he holds high. Wil was a few credits short of graduation when the NFL called, but came home to finish during the offseason after his rookie year. That summer, the criminal justice major and professional football player completed his coursework by interning with the Atlanta Police Department.
“He knew that it was very important to us that he finished his studies,” says Julie, who holds four degrees, “but it was also very important to him. It was a goal.”
For Wil’s friends and family back home, it’s still surreal to see him on Sundays hold a finger in the air during a kickoff or line up to kick a crucial field goal (“I hold my breath every time!” Julie says). But if you ask any of them, Wil is still the quietly confident kid with a laid-back personality — he’s just in way better shape than the skinny guy who walked onto the Panthers football team eight years ago.
“You’d never know from talking to him that he has one of the hardest jobs in sports,” Wesley says. “The life of an NFL player is so difficult. As a kicker, he’s out there playing for his livelihood every game. He doesn’t take anything for granted. He knows where he comes from, and he knows anything can change.”
Says Wil, the walk-on, the undrafted player cut in the preseason and, now, a Pro Bowler and one of the best kickers in the business:
“I never sit here and say, ‘Wow, I made it.’ It’s more like, ‘Wow, I can’t believe I’m here.’”
TWO SECONDS.
FIFTY-EIGHT YARDS.
It was the New Orleans Saints’ first game of the 2019 season against the Houston Texans on “Monday Night Football,” and with two ticks left on the clock, Wil Lutz had to make the longest field goal of his career to win the game.
By every metric, Lutz is one of the best kickers in the NFL. He makes nearly 90 percent of his field goal attempts and owns the Saints’ franchise record for kicking 26 in a row. Not only is he accurate, he’s got range — Lutz has missed only three kicks of more than 50 yards in the past two seasons.
But one of those was at the end of the first half of that Monday Night game when his 56-yard try sailed wide to the left.
“We talked at halftime, and I told him, ‘You’ll get another shot,’” says Thomas Morstead, the Saints punter and the holder for Lutz’s field goal and extra point attempts.
Lutz did, and there was no doubt from the moment his right foot walloped the ball that his kick was good. Even before it cruised through the uprights, Morstead spun around and rushed his kicker, teammate and friend. The Mercedes-Benz Superdome erupted as the Saints poured onto the field and swarmed him.
“We knew going onto the field that he was going to make that kick,” Morstead says. “We just knew.”
That was how Wil Lutz, a former walk-on player at Georgia State who went undrafted in the NFL, began his first Pro-Bowl season.
The Saints mob Wil Lutz after his game-winning 58-yard field goal, the longest of his career, beat the Texans 30-28.
— Photo by Butch Dill / Associated Press
—
In spring 2012, a skinny kid with braces on his teeth walked into the Georgia State football team’s locker room. Bill Curry, then the team’s coach and himself an NFL Pro-Bowler, eyeballed the kid and asked, “And who are you?”
“I’m your kicker, coach,” Wil responded, smiling.
“He looked like he was about 13 years old,” Curry remembers. “But then we saw him kick. There was a different sound when he kicked the ball. It wasn’t hard to see that he had the raw ingredients to be great, but what we didn’t know then was how hard he works.”
Wil grew up playing soccer and didn’t start playing football until his junior year at Northgate High School in Newnan, Ga. His older brother, Wesley (B.A. ’14), also a soccer player, was approached by the school’s football coach, Tommy Walburn, to kick for the football team.
“Being the little brother, I always wanted to be better,” Wil says. “So, when they asked him to kick, I wanted to do it, too. That’s how it all started.”
Wesley, academy director of the Southern Soccer Academy in Atlanta and a former coach with the women’s and men’s soccer teams at Georgia State, is two years older than Wil.
“He wanted [to be the kicker], you could tell,” Wesley says. “He won the job as a junior and was also the team’s punter his senior year.”
Wesley and Wil are the sons of educators. Their father, Bob, is a middle-school science teacher and taught both of his sons when they were eighth-graders.
“Dad gave Wesley his first B,” Wil remembers. “That was a weird report card day.”
Their mother, Julie, was Wil’s elementary school principal. She’s now dean and associate professor of education at Truett McConnell University in Cleveland, Ga.
“Wil was a mess of a kid,” Julie says. “He sees something he wants to do, and he jumps in both feet- and head-first. That’s how he’s been his whole life.”
There was no slacking in the Lutz household when it came to the boys’ schoolwork.
“Looking back, I really appreciate it,” Wil says, “but if you asked me when I was in middle or high school, I would’ve said something totally different.”
At Georgia State, Wil was on the Athletic Director’s Honor Roll as a criminal justice major and, if football didn’t pan out, he planned to go to law school. Julie says that, though he usually came home with good grades, juggling academics and athletics was tough.
“We were pretty hard on him, but he’s a hard worker and always has been,” she says. “If he didn’t do well on a test or on the field, he would take it as a challenge. He was the kind of kid — and now, he’s the kind of man — who says, ‘OK, I’ll show you.’”
Based on his stats, Wil wasn’t a great kicker in high school (“I was a strong-legged soccer player learning how to kick a football,” he says), but Curry’s coaching staff was intrigued by his potential — just not enough to give him a full ride. Wil was offered scholarships from a handful of smaller schools, but he chose to walk on at Georgia State to prove he could play Division I football.
He started his freshman season as the team’s kickoff specialist, a position tailor-made for a guy who can boot the ball a mile. Four games in, he took over all placekicking duties. He was perfect on all his extra point attempts and only missed two field goals, both from long range at 48 and 54 yards.
He earned his scholarship as a sophomore and kicked his first 50-plus yard field goal — a school-record 53-yarder against No. 1 Alabama (the only points the Panthers scored that day). Halfway through his junior year, just like in high school, he took over as the team’s punter.
“That actually turned out to be one of the best things that ever happened to me because it showed [NFL] teams that I could handle all three kicking duties,” Lutz says.
Going into his senior season, it was Wil Lutz the punter who was an all-conference selection and a preseason nominee for the Ray Guy Award, given to the nation’s best at the position.
He finished his college career as Georgia State’s leader in games played, field goals and extra points made, and overall points scored. That kick in Tuscaloosa, Ala., against the Crimson Tide still stands as the longest in program history.
“When he made that kick, a guy we know turned to us and said, ‘That’s what he’ll be known for,’” Julie remembers. “I saw that guy not too long ago, and said, ‘Well, he’s known for a lot more than that one kick now, isn’t he?”
Wil holds the NFL record for consecutive field goals made on the road. He’s pretty good at home, too. Last season, he made 20 field goals in the Mercedes-Benz Superdome.
—
Wil wasn’t selected in the 2016 NFL Draft.
“He really didn’t know if he’d make it to the NFL,” says Julie. “He even got a dog.” (Cooper, a Catahoula, currently lives with Julie and Bob and wears a Saints doggy jersey during Wil’s games.)
But his versatility — the ability to send a kickoff deep into the end zone, kick field goals as well as punt — interested NFL general managers, and he received a handful of training camp invitations.
“I had what they call a ‘camp leg,’” Wil says. “I was basically the guy NFL teams want to bring in during training camp so their starters can rest.”
That spring, Wil made an extraordinary decision. He signed with the Baltimore Ravens, a team with one of the league’s best field goal kickers, Justin Tucker, entrenched as the starter. Wil knew his odds of making an NFL roster were slim, so he picked Baltimore, an organization known for prioritizing its special teams and developing special teams’ players.
“Why not go to a place where I can learn from the best?” he says.
Wil processed everything during training camp and soaked up the experience like a sponge. He played so well during the preseason that Ravens coach John Harbaugh hoped another team would try to trade for him.
“It was like, I knew I didn’t belong, but while I’m here, I’m going to take advantage of every opportunity,” Wil says.
Then the Ravens cut him after the third preseason game.
“He called, said he was coming home and moved in with me the next day,” Wesley remembers. “He thought that might be it, so he started working with the equipment staff at Georgia State.”
His campus job lasted a week. Wil was invited to work out for the New Orleans Saints — a team with an unsettled kicking situation. It was his performance in Baltimore that led to the opportunity. Harbaugh, the Ravens coach, was so impressed with the rookie that he urged his friend, Saints coach Sean Payton, to give him a look.
After his audition with the Saints, Payton told the media that Wil had “probably the best kicking workout I’ve ever seen.”
“When Wil called me that time around, he said he wasn’t coming home,” Wesley says.
The Saints cut two veteran kickers on their roster before the regular season started, clearing the way for him.
Charlie Cobb, Georgia State’s athletics director, who remains close with Wil, says his decision to hone his craft during that training camp in Baltimore was a masterstroke.
“I mean, what hopeful NFL player thinks to do something like that? He knew he wasn’t going to walk in and beat out Justin Tucker. But guess what? He learned, he got better and he blew them away,” Cobb says. “And that led to his opportunity with the Saints.”
Since signing with the Saints, Wil has become one of the most reliable kickers in one of the most high-pressure jobs in professional sports.
In 2018, he made 28 of his 30 field goal attempts and 52 out of 53 extra points. This past March, the Saints rewarded him with a five-year contract extension that made him the league’s highest-paid kicker at the time.
This past season, Wil was second in the league in points scored, third in field goals made and he set an NFL record by making 35 straight kicks on the road. He was named to his first Pro Bowl and took his family to the game in Orlando, Fla.
“We didn’t get to see much of him because he was so busy,” Julie says, “but to see all of these NFL stars and people wanting his autograph … I was one proud mama.”
His head coach back at Georgia State is proud, too. Curry says he and his wife, Carolyn (M.A. ’79, Ph.D. ’87), watch as many of his games as they can and keep a running count of his field goals.
“He’s a great kicker and a great young man,” Curry says. “You don’t get great because of natural ability. You get great because you’re willing to spend more hours working on your skill than other people.
“And that son of a gun kicks ’em right down the middle.”
FLOWN THE COOP
WIL LUTZ IS AN ATLANTA FALCONS FAN NO MORE
“My buddies give me a hard time, but I’ve truly embraced the New Orleans legacy of hating the Falcons,” says Lutz, who grew up a Falcons fans and played all his collegiate home games in the Georgia Dome, the Falcons' home until 2017.
Going into this season, his career-long field goal was a 57-yarder against the Falcons in the Mercedes-Benz Superdome.
“All of my family and friends were there,” Lutz says of the kick during his rookie year. “That was a big moment for me. I always have a lot of motivation in those games. Knock on wood, I’m 22 for 22 against Atlanta.”
—
Wil has put roots down in the Big Easy. He just bought a house on a leafy, live oak–lined street in New Orleans’ historic Garden District, and he’s getting married in April. He met his fiancée, Megan Fox, a Florida native, in New Orleans three years ago. Last summer, he flew her parents and a handful of her friends to town before he dropped to a knee and proposed to her atop the Ponchartrain Hotel.
“We love the good food, the parades, and we’ve really gotten into the culture here,” he says.
Last Mardi Gras, he rode on a leopard-spotted chariot in the “Krewe of Bacchus” parade, and he and Megan are a regular sight at the city’s restaurants, events and festivals.
The couple are active in the community and volunteer with two of his teammates’ charitable foundations: Morstead’s “What You Give Will Grow,” which helps children battling cancer, and the “Brees Dream Foundation,” future Hall of Fame quarterback Drew Brees’ charity that helps improve the quality of life for cancer patients and provides assistance for the needy.
“The first time I met Drew, I called him ‘sir,’” Wil says, laughing. “He’s one of those guys who I get to share the locker room with who I grew up idolizing.”
Lutz and Morstead, also a fellow college walk-on, have forged a particularly close friendship. The two, along with snapper Zach Wood, work closely together as a symbiotic operation — snap-hold-kick, snap-hold-kick — on thousands of repetitions in order to make those 58-yarders when a game is on the line.
“I consider Wil a close friend, and I’m excited for his future on and off the field,” Morstead says.
Wil is also one of the Georgia State Alumni Association’s 40 Under 40 for 2020, a list of the most influential and innovative graduates under the age of 40. It’s an honor he holds high. Wil was a few credits short of graduation when the NFL called, but came home to finish during the offseason after his rookie year. That summer, the criminal justice major and professional football player completed his coursework by interning with the Atlanta Police Department.
“He knew that it was very important to us that he finished his studies,” says Julie, who holds four degrees, “but it was also very important to him. It was a goal.”
For Wil’s friends and family back home, it’s still surreal to see him on Sundays hold a finger in the air during a kickoff or line up to kick a crucial field goal (“I hold my breath every time!” Julie says). But if you ask any of them, Wil is still the quietly confident kid with a laid-back personality — he’s just in way better shape than the skinny guy who walked onto the Panthers football team eight years ago.
“You’d never know from talking to him that he has one of the hardest jobs in sports,” Wesley says. “The life of an NFL player is so difficult. As a kicker, he’s out there playing for his livelihood every game. He doesn’t take anything for granted. He knows where he comes from, and he knows anything can change.”
Says Wil, the walk-on, the undrafted player cut in the preseason and, now, a Pro Bowler and one of the best kickers in the business:
“I never sit here and say, ‘Wow, I made it.’ It’s more like, ‘Wow, I can’t believe I’m here.’”