“There is nothing in this life that can destroy you but yourself. Bad things happen to everyone, but when they do, you can’t just fall apart and die. You have to fight back.” — Alexandra Monir, “Timeless”

I wasn’t sure I’d have the strength to write this — at least not so soon.

Even as I sit here at the keyboard, two days after the tragedy, trying to put my feelings into words, I’m suffering from debilitating flashbacks, panic sweats, and rekeyed anxiety that causes painful tension in every muscle. I feel like a meat sack full of over-tuned guitar strings.

The Lions.

Oh, God, the Lions.

I can’t fully describe the high of heading into halftime on top of the mighty 49ers by 17 points in the game that would decide whether Detroit saw its first-ever Super Bowl.

I definitely can’t find the words to express the dogged low of Detroit walking out of that stadium three points shy of making history, from making one of my childhood dreams come true, from lifting an entire city, an entire state, up on its shoulders.

In the first 30 minutes of play, we stomped all over those California kings like angry bulls on fallen matadors. They couldn’t move the ball and we moved it as if running back David Montgomery planned to carry the ball all the way to the big show in Las Vegas.

I was ecstatic, fighting the urge to celebrate too early, nervously gnawing on my buffalo wings like a rabid hyena.

Finally, after practically all my life, I could at least see on the nearer and nearer horizon the payoff of a lifetime of rooting for one of the downest-and-outest teams in the NFL — one of only four teams to never make it to the big game, one of only two that have existed the entire Super Bowl era to never even sniff the Lombardi Trophy.

All my dear Lions had to do was hold strong for 30 more minutes. A few more solid stops on defense, a few more big runs.

We could really get there.

Oh, dear Lord, we could really get there.

The sizeable contingent of Honolulu blue in the California crowd started chanting our quarterback’s name:

“Jared Goff! Jared Goff! Jared Goff!”

Then the horizon slid 51 yards farther away.

They called it a lucky bomb. They called it a circus catch. They called it an “immaculate deflection.”

San Francisco quarterback Brock Purdy zoomed a prayer all the way down the field, but, as we’d done so well all night, we got there first.

Detroit cornerback Kindle Vildor reached out for what could have been a death knell interception ahead of San Francisco receiver Brandon Aiyuk, but it slipped through Vildor’s arms. Then it seemed like we might still have it, but it bounced off Vildor’s facemask. Then it looked like it might at least fall incomplete, but then Aiyuk stumbled forward and opened his arms and …

It felt over then, even with most of the second half to go. I suddenly felt very, very tired.

The 49ers scored on that drive. Then we fumbled the ball on our next push and they recovered. They scored on that drive. And then we couldn’t complete a pass for the life of us. We stopped running the ball. We went for it on fourth down and inexplicably took to the air on that one, too, and it fell incomplete.

In the end, the 49ers made up their 17-point deficit and added 10 more points. We scored one more touchdown in a flashy last gasp, but we fell in the end, 34-31.

Now what?

I keep thinking of the great Lions ambassador Barry Sanders, who wore the Honolulu blue the last time the Lions made it to the NFC Championship a generation ago. In a new documentary, Sanders says of that 41-10 thumping by Washington in 1992, essentially, “I thought we’d be back.”

They never made it back.

In fact, no Detroit squad until the current one even won a playoff game since then.

So I and plenty of other longtime Lions fans must worry now that this squad — this kneecap-noshing, grit-filled, hard-knock squad — will repeat the Sanders era and end up as nothing but a flash of legend-producing greatness followed by generational drought.

Sanders quit, like Calvin Johnson quit and Matthew Stafford left, because he was tired of losing. If the Lions can’t drum up playoff wins in future seasons, who on this squad might get tired of playing so hard for losers and give up the ghost?

But I, for one, refuse to give in to pessimism.

It feels like we have all the right pieces to put together a winning puzzle — the right receivers and the right running backs and a good quarterback and a decent defense and the right play caller (thank God Offensive Coordinator Ben Johnson decided to stay) and a coach who believes in his players and makes them believe in themselves. We have a smart general manager who makes sound investments.

We have a young, talented squad full of frothy hunger.

They’ll be back.

They have to be back.

They have plenty of kneecaps left to bite.

Justin A. Hinkley can be reached at 989-354-3112 or jhinkley@thealpenanews.com. Follow him on Twitter @JustinHinkley.