CHARLOTTE — The questions were simple ones. Do you know what day it is? Do you know what time it is?

"It's Sunday. It's almost 1 o'clock," Luke Kuechly replied last Sunday morning, and his estimate was only off by an hour and some change. But considering what he had been through the past week, he had the operative part right.

"It's game day."

For Luke Kuechly, getting to game day last week was no simple task.

All it took was about 20,000 air miles, close enough to around the world that the difference can only be measured in coffee. And there was a lot of coffee, most of it black. But also a lot of sleep, but only when it made sense.

Because for Luke Kuechly to do anything, it requires a plan. And to call a pair of football games 65 hours apart on opposite sides of the globe required the Luke Kuechly-est of plans.

On Thursday of Week 1, he was in Melbourne, Australia, calling the 49ers and Rams for Netflix, which became a case study in the importance of getting the travel right. Then Sunday at 1 p.m., he was in his normal spot in the radio booth next to Jake Delhomme and Anish Shroff for the Panthers Radio Network call of the opener against the Bears. He saw a lot of football, a whole lot of the inside of an airplane (and his eyelids), but not a single kangaroo.

But by the time kickoff rolled around in Charlotte, he was back in his natural habitat.

"This part was always going to happen," he replied when asked if he was sure he was going to get back home and be coherent in time to call a Panthers game on the radio. "A lot of it is just planning."

Of course Luke Kuechly had a plan.

Getting to Australia was a testament to his discipline and ability to make a plan for himself and prepare for peak performance.

He split the difference between the 49ers (who were there a week early for the Thursday night Eastern/Friday morning in Australia kickoff) and the Rams (who basically flew in the day before to keep the adjustment in check on the way home.

"OK, so I left Charlotte last Sunday, and my flight was at 2:30 from Charlotte to Los Angeles, and then we had like a four-hour layover," he began. "And then our flight from LA to Melbourne, I think it was at like 10 (p.m.), and then we landed in Australia on Tuesday morning at 6:45."

So two days in the air. Check.

Kuechly prepped himself, knowing Melbourne was 14 hours ahead of what he used to, and in true control-what-you-can-control football-guy fashion, that meant having a game plan.

"I think a lot of it was, what's the fastest way to get on the local time clock of the place you're going?" Kuechly said. "So going there was a lot easier because we left at like 10 o'clock on Sunday night out of LA. So the goal was to try to just stay awake as long as I could on the flight out there. And then once I was ready to fall asleep, and I couldn't fight it anymore, I fell asleep for probably, I think seven or seven-and-a-half hours, and then you wake up, and it's two hours left until you land. And then you're kind of on that time schedule if you can just grind through until that evening.

"So Tuesday evening, about 9:30, 10 o'clock is when I went to bed, and you wake up the next day, and you're pretty close to on schedule there."

Once he landed, his itinerary was a blur of production meetings, prep for the game, a trip to 49ers practice, and dinners with his Netflix co-workers. He had never been on that particular continent, but he also didn't have a lot of time to sightsee. The biggest adjustment might have been getting off the plane and being hit with the realization he was in the Southern Hemisphere, and remembering it was late winter rather than the summer he left back home.

"You leave Charlotte, and it's 95 degrees, but when we landed it was 45, which obviously was awesome," Kuechly said. "I love the cooler weather."

When the weather gets like this at home, he's thinking about hunting, but he was limited to seeing a bit of the city of Melbourne, and that was it.

"Yeah, no wildlife, no critters," he sighed, a bit forlornly. "We were in the city for the most part. But you get there, get through customs, it's a little later than you think, and you drink a coffee, you have something to eat, and power through."

Since the game was Friday morning, Melbourne time (when he recounts the timeline, you have to remember he lost an entire day in translation), he didn't leave until "Saturday" for the return trip, which included a connection in Dallas, and got back to Charlotte around 9:45 p.m. Eastern, or about 12 hours short of a week after he left.

He won't let you feel too sorry for him; he was "up front," meaning he had the most comfortable accommodations you can have on such a long flight, but it still was a grind.

All he did was just under 20,000 air miles and call the first of his four-game national television package with Netflix. He'll also call a couple of games in Weeks 3 and 4 for CBS, but other than a holiday week off to spend with family, he'll still do his planned 12-game package for the Panthers, including the Week 2 affair in Atlanta later today (and he's excited for the 45-minute flight home).

Being ready for all that football takes a lot of work, but that's nothing new for Kuechly. Throughout the preseason, he had his podcast partner and close friend JJ Jansen helping him prep for the Rams and 49ers (as Jansen does for Greg Olsen during the playoffs and bye weeks when he's not busy with his day job). And it was a busy preseason, which included a little affair in Ohio when he was inducted into Pro Football Hall of Fame.

He had every excuse to glide by on Being Luke Kuechly in this first one, but no one who knew him expected that.

"He was a pro," Jansen said. "He did all the prep work, and then some."

What's harder to prepare for was the physical toll of flying halfway around the Earth and back in a week, and functioning when you get back.

Jansen laughed last Friday, saying when he woke up to read the (positive) reviews of his friend's national debut, he noticed he had a text from him that arrived in the middle of the night.

"Wore out," Kuechly wrote. "Wish I could teleport home."

(As tired as he was, he remains Luke Kuechly, and polite. So any text communications with people back home all included some version of "sorry about the time, I'm in Australia.")

But after getting back to Charlotte around 10 p.m., the night before the Bears game, his challenge was making it as normal as possible.

"A solid seven hours of sleep, I woke up and kind of just do what I do on a normal day," Kuechly said. "Go get a coffee and then start making my way to the stadium, see Donnie and Danny and the guys, and then come up and see what we have going on in the booth and then you're ready to go for kickoff."

Here's a side note about Kuechly and coffee that will not surprise you — he's not a man for complicated orders. "I'd say I'm 80 percent black coffee, maybe 10 percent iced, maybe 10 percent iced latte," he said. That tracks; this is a man who strives for simplicity and effectiveness, and hot black coffee is the shortest distance between two points.

And while he said he only had "a coffee" (singular), he did not specify how big the cup was.

So when he came into the Bank of America Stadium equipment room around 10 a.m. for his normal pregame lap last week, they were guessing it might have been a gallon jug.

"He was coming in hot," assistant equipment manager Danny O'Toole said.

"Yeah, he was shot out of a cannon when he walked in Sunday morning," equipment manager Don Toner said.

"I'd say," echoed equipment assistant Greg Almond. "He ran in and picked me up and slammed me down in a chair; he was ready to go."

But the equipment room is Kuechly's home base, the place he feels comfortable, and those are his people, who are used to the roughhousing. The press box is work, so after he made his way through the tunnels and up the elevator, it was time to get into character.

When Traci Langton, the wife of executive producer David Langton, greeted Kuechly with a tray of Morning Glory muffins she baked (he'll usually bring her a cooler of meat during hunting season to pay her back), she was concerned about how fresh he'd be.

"He walks in the door, and everybody's worried about him," she recalled. "But he's like, 'I'm OK, I'm OK, I'm OK.'"

Moments later, he sat alone in the booth next to where they call the game. He had to find a quiet place on a busy day of visitors, well-wishers, and the excitement of the opener.

He had last-minute notes to go over, and he needed a moment for himself.

The broadcast went as the broadcast goes. Kuechly's the analytical one, Delhomme's the storyteller, and in the back of their minds, they had a plan that included the former quarterback taking a bigger role, just in case Kuechly zonked out halfway through.

"Honestly, feeling pretty good," Kuechly said before kickoff. "Ask me again at the half."

But again, this is Luke Kuechly we're talking about. He wasn't going to give less than his best, and if you hadn't known he was in Australia the "day" before, you wouldn't have known it by listening to him.

"Not at all," David Langton, his Panthers producer since the first days of his forays into broadcasting, said when asked if he could tell a difference.

"In fact, when he first walked in, I asked him how he was doing, and he said he felt great," Langton continued. "And I said, 'Are you a tough-guy great, or are you like really great?' And he said, 'No, I feel really, really good. I got a good night's sleep, and I'm prepared, and I'm ready to go.'

"So no, he was awesome."

Langton has been shepherding this broadcast for more than three decades (he's produced every game in franchise history), so he can tell the difference between a good one and a bad one. And if there was a lack of energy from the Hall of Famer, he couldn't sense it in the fourth quarter of a game in which both defenses only occasionally participated.

"No, he was as fired up and engaged at the end as he always is," Langton said. "Not just physically but mentally he was sharp and prepared and ready to do the game. There was nothing different.

"And he even helped clean up the front row of the booth after the game was over."

Of course he did.

When the game was over, the coffee buzz had worn off, and his friends in equipment could tell me was on fumes when they saw him afterward.

"I got done, and then I went to sleep, and I slept a little longer than I normally did on a Monday morning," he admitted midweek. "But I think you get through that, that first day back, and you're busy, busy, busy, busy. And then you get home, and it's like, I'm ready to go to sleep."

It hit him at a certain point. Even Superman has to go back to the Fortress of Solitude every now and then.

So as he walked back out of Bank of America Stadium last Sunday night, he was tired, but knew he didn't have to get back in another airplane for at least six days.

"I'm like, OK, I just have to drive 20 minutes back to my house instead of flying across the world, right?" he laughed. "Yeah, that's the best part. Just get in the car, drive down Providence Road, and you're there."