We’re about to see a matchup we’ve waited almost four years to witness

During a “Thursday Night Football” game on Oct. 17, 2019, the Kansas City Chiefs were leading the Denver Broncos 10-6 at Empower Field at Mile High. With 10 minutes remaining in the second quarter, Kansas City attempted a quarterback sneak from the Denver 5-yard line. Patrick Mahomes gained two yards on the play — but when it was over, he was in obvious pain. It turned out that he had dislocated his kneecap.

There were two things that happened as a direct result of Mahomes' injury that night.

The first was that for the remainder of the 2019 season — and the three seasons after that — he would not run a quarterback sneak.

The second was that he was on the sidelines for the following week’s game against the Green Bay Packers at Arrowhead Stadium — a highly-anticipated game in which Mahomes — 2018’s NFL MVP — would have faced the Packers’ two-time NFL MVP Aaron Rodgers.

Since that night in Denver three and a half years ago, Mahomes has also become a two-time NFL MVP — and has collected two Super Bowl MVP awards (and championship rings). Rodgers, however, still has just one of each of those — although he is now a four-time NFL MVP winner.

And Mahomes and Rodgers still haven’t played in the same game — even though it could have happened in 2021 (when Rodgers missed a Chiefs-Packers game after testing positive for COVID) and in three of the four postseasons since then.

But now, Rodgers has been traded to the AFC’s New York Jets — a team Kansas City plays much more often than the NFC’s Green Bay team.

Since January, we’ve known that this season, the Chiefs would travel to face the Jets. And now it’s been reported that the two teams will meet for Week 4’s “Sunday Night Football” on October 1.

Finally ... two of the best quarterbacks of an era will take the field. We’ll have been waiting 1,445 days to see what will happen.