KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Andy Reid is standing behind a lectern 15 minutes after a loss, and before we can even fire off a question, he captures its essence in 11 words.

“You can out-stat them to death,” he said, “but it doesn’t matter.”

The Chiefs’ head coach exits the interview after a handful of minutes and returns to the locker room, where cornerback Trent McDuffie is standing in front of a throng of media.

“At the end of the day,” McDuffie said, “it’s just the little details.”

The locker room all but clears out before quarterback Patrick Mahomes returns to the interview room that Reid just vacated.

“We let a game slip away,” Mahomes said.

Five minutes later, Chris Jones strolls into the same space — not all that unlike his stroll on his final play — and offers the same sentiment more forcefully.

“We gave this game away,” he said. “So many, so many mistakes.”

The Chiefs played really good football in a lot of areas Monday — except they still lost where it matters most. And at some point, the irony has to land:

So this is the blender the Chiefs have spun teams through for the last half-decade.

This sentence might make you want to slam whatever device you’re using to read it, but let’s give it a shot anyway: The Chiefs should feel better about their long-term prospects after a 31-28 loss to Jaguars in a wildly entertaining game worthy of its “Monday Night Football” promotion.

But they should feel so, so much worse about the result.

The Chiefs dominated the game in ways I plan to explain, but that alone provides a headline: The Chiefs don’t lose these kinds of games.

Including the postseason, they were 12-0 in one-score contests a year ago. Through five weeks this year, they are 0-3. If you want to point out that speaks to some luck factored into last year, I won’t argue.

But when I said the Chiefs don’t lose these kinds of games, I meant that literally, and I meant it dating back much more than one year.

Patrick Mahomes has never lost an NFL game like he just lost in Jacksonville.

The Chiefs totaled 476 yards of offense and allowed the Jaguars to manage only 319. In starts by Mahomes, the Chiefs were 28-0 when totaling at least 375 yards of offense and allowing fewer than 350.

28-0!

As though navigating a 17-game season as a targeted team wasn’t difficult enough, the Chiefs have decided to try to do it absent their best feature.

Don’t get me wrong. They’ve had plenty of days when they’ve played pretty poorly. Some stinkers, even. But they actually win some of those stinkers.

The framework for that statistic I just mentioned — you know, the one that sets parameters for their 28-0 record? If you invert it — sort through games in which the Chiefs total fewer than 350 yards and allow at least 375 — they are 6-5.

You wonder how the Chiefs have created a dynasty? They have a winning record in their worst games. And they win all the games when they’re great.

Until Monday.

And they really were great for large segments of the game in Jacksonville.

That makes for a frustrating night — but it provides the potential of a promising future.

If the Chiefs play more games like they played Monday night in Jacksonville, they’re going to be just fine. Better than fine. They’ll be really good.

It’s easy to forget the Chiefs looked like an offense that needed to burn the playbook after a couple of weeks — easy to forget only because they just put up 476 yards against the No. 4 scoring defense in the NFL.

This isn’t some fool’s gold or a quest to look for positives. If you create a formula that has produced a 28-0 record, do you respond to a single defeat by trying to replicate the formula, or do you rip everything up and start from scratch?

The history suggests the odds were overwhelming the Chiefs were good enough to win Monday.

The running game had its best night. Isiah Pacheco had a run he hasn’t produced in a year. Kareem Hunt had a run he hasn’t produced in four years.

Tyquan Thornton looks like a real player. Hollywood Brown had the two best catches of his Chiefs career. Xavier Worthy? Still fast. Still effective.

The offense line protected like it did a week ago, and for once that’s a compliment. Mahomes wasn’t sacked once.

Put it together, and the Chiefs totaled 7.56 yards per play. That’s their best mark since November 2022 — nearly three years. They only once reached 6 yards per play in the last 13 months, and that’s a game they won by 19 points.

That touched a ceiling they did not reach a year ago, at least offensively.

Yes, I know. The defense needs the stop at the end, but I’ll point out they had not one, not two but three players drop the same interception on a drive the Jaguars would turn into seven points. The opposing quarterback tripped and fell, and then tripped and fell again, and then returned to his feet to score the game-winning touchdown.

You know what would be far more worrisome? If they had allowed, say, 476 yards. Wouldn’t that prompt one of those this-isn’t-good-enough columns? (Yes.)

The Chiefs lost with their best formula over the last seven years. That stings in the present. It stings that it leads to a third-place standing in a division they’ve owned for a decade.

But what might their future entail if this formula sticks around?

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