Sports are incredible, almost everyone on the planet is somehow involved with athletics, whether it be playing, watching, or even their job. Sports are a way to unite the whole world into one giant community, and comebacks are arguably the best part of sports. Something about seeing a team with an improbable chance of winning a game somehow manages the impossible. This prompted me to attempt to make the perfect list of professional athletics comebacks. I had a few criteria for determining this list, the gravity of the situation (valuing championship games), the severity of the comeback, and being sure to include a variety of sports.
- FC Barcelona vs. PSG 2017 UEFA Champions League Round of 16
The only reason this isn’t higher on this list is because it isn’t a championship or semifinal, but in terms of comeback it is arguably the strongest one on this list. How the Champions League works is there are two legs for the knockout stages, one game at each team’s stadium, and the scores of the games are combined, resulting in some crazy comebacks. In the first game, PSG won 4-0, giving Barcelona a negligible chance of moving on to the quarterfinals. However, this was not the case, somehow this infamous Barcelona squad managed the impossible. They won the second match 6-1, making the overall aggregate 6-5 in favor of Barcelona, advancing them to the quarter-finals.
- New England Patriots vs. Atlanta Falcons 2017 Super Bowl
Every American Football fan on the planet remembers this game, the Falcons were red hot, Matt Ryan was the MVP, and it was totally plausible to predict them to lift the Lombardi Trophy. This confidence only increased as the game went on, in the third quarter Atlanta had a 28-3 lead over New England. But somehow, Tom Brady, Dont’a Hightower, and James White managed to lead one of the most well-known comebacks in sports history and win the Super Bowl against all odds.
- Boston Red Sox vs. New York Yankees 2004 ALCS
If I’m being completely honest, I wasn’t too familiar with this series before I started making this list, but as I read about it, I became enthralled. Not only was this game the predecessor of the World Series, but also the biggest rivalry in baseball, Sox vs. Yanks. Going into the ninth inning the Red Sox were down 4-3, but the Yankees weren’t able to capitalize on the lead in the top of the inning, putting all the pressure on the Sox in the bottom of the ninth. And somehow Bill Mueller was able to tie it up and force extra innings, where the Red Sox closed it out and advanced to the world series.
- Cleveland Cavaliers vs. Golden State Warriors 2016 NBA Finals
Everyone knows what happened here, Lebron James, Kyrie Irving, and the rest of the Cavs had gone down 3-1 to the Golden State Warriors in the 2016 NBA Finals, and they against all odds, came back. This season’s Warriors was technically the best team of all time, according to record, going 73-9 in the regular season. Never before had any team come back from benign down 3-1 in the Finals, and game seven also produced two of the most famous plays in NBA history, Lebron James’ block on Andre Iguodala, and Kyrie Irving’s clutch three over Stephen Curry.
- Tiger Woods 2019 Masters
This may be controversial, as it is technically not a comeback in terms of losing by a lot of points in the middle of a series or game, but it is the greatest comeback story in all of professional sports. Tiger Woods was in a bad spot, he had received multiple back surgeries, he was in a very rough relationship, and his golf game was at an all-time low. Woods had gone almost 11 years without winning a single major, by far the longest stretch of his career, resulting in everyone essentially writing him off to compete for this year’s famed green jacket. Woods went into the final Sunday down by two strokes to Francesco Molinari and tied with Tony Finau. Despite all of these obstacles standing in his way, Tiger managed to prove everyone wrong, and won the most iconic golf tournament in the world, culminating in what is, in my opinion, the best comeback in the history of sports.
