CHARLOTTE — The shirts say "Been there, won that."
And now they, like the team, can breathe.
The NFC South division championship gear has been in Charlotte for a minute, and they were on a truck to Tampa, where they sat unopened and unused, and then they came home. But mostly, for the last two weeks, they've been in boxes that were opened carefully, checked for accuracy, and quickly closed.
"We mainly just made sure it had a Panther head on it; sometimes we get something of another team by mistake," Panthers equipment manager Don Toner explained Monday. "But after that, we sealed it back up, and nobody wanted to touch it."
That's the superstition of football. The Panthers' division title shirts and hats were around, but no one talked about them. The mysterious boxes sat in the back of the equipment room, and no one wanted to touch them, lest they become the reason they never came out of the box.
But yesterday afternoon, shortly after the Falcons beat the Saints to secure the title for the Panthers, the equipment staff finally got to unseal the boxes (again) and distribute them, hanging a shirt and a hat in every player's locker, and passing them out to the football staff that was in the office. They're waiting for another shipment in what Toner called "human sizes," since the first batch they got from the league were 2X and up so players could pull them over shoulder pads in the moment.
Players are off on Monday while coaches game-plan for the Rams, so today's quiet around the building. But when players return to work Tuesday to prepare for the Rams this weekend, they'll be hanging in their lockers there waiting for them.
It's not quite the dramatic reveal of handing them out in the victorious moment after a team clinches something.
Former Panthers quarterback Jake Delhomme got a couple of them, one in 2003 at Arizona, and another in New Orleans in 2008.
"I remember wearing it in the locker room, I remember wearing it on the plane the whole ride home," Delhomme said.
But what he distinctly remembers is the feeling that came with it. When he collected his first shirt and hat in 2003, Toner and former equipment manager Jackie Miles had dragged the boxes around for a few weeks, as the Panthers started 8-2 that year but then lost three straight in the middle of the season before clinching the division at Arizona.
"Mostly for us at that time, it was relief," Delhomme said.
He got another one in 2008, but that one had to wait until the final week of the season in New Orleans.
This year, the timing makes it a little anticlimactic, since players were in for a team meeting Sunday before the Falcons-Saints game, and when coach Dave Canales talked to reporters afterward, he admitted he hadn't seen his gear yet.
"I need to get that done," he laughed Sunday night. "Just short of driving back to Bank of America Stadium to the office, to pick up our shirts and hats, but there will be a time for that.
"I'm just super proud right now."
The shirts and hats can also be purchased by fans who want to celebrate the moment.
They're available online at shop.panthers.com, or they're also available at the team store at Bank of America Stadium, which is open from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., Monday through Friday, and an hour before gates open on Saturday.
