CANTON, Ohio — The Carolina Panthers had a need. Jared Allen had a want.

And in a matter of hours, maybe three phone calls, and a couple of cross-country flights, it came together quickly.

The way they talk about it now seems very casual, very matter-of-fact. But it's not every day a team in the middle of a 15-1 run deals for a future Hall of Famer to effectively become a role player.

But 2015 was an amazing time at a lot of levels, for both Allen on the tail end of a career that has him one sleep away from a gold jacket, and a Panthers team that was one game away from immortality.

"Yeah, so I orchestrated that trade," Allen began, which is another fairly startling admission to be delivered so nonchalantly. But that's Allen, and why he was such a perfect fit for the 2015 Carolina Panthers.

On Sept. 27, the Bears lost 26-0 on the road against the Seahawks, and Allen had kind of had enough. The Bears fell to 0-3 and didn't appear to be turning things around anytime soon. And the two-time NFL sack king, who was stuck on 134.0 career sacks at that moment, was looking for something else.

So when the flight from Seattle landed, he went to then-Bears coach John Fox and 38-year-old general manager Ryan Pace, both in the first years of their jobs, meaning they weren't around when he signed a four-year, $32 million contract with the Bears, and they were thinking about a longer rebuild.

"I went to Fox and Ryan Pace, and I knew I was retiring after that year, and I asked them to trade me," Allen recalled. "They didn't want to at first, and I'm like, I'm retiring, we have a group full of young guys. Let me go somewhere and just have fun my last year. Let me try to get a ring, right?"

Of course, there was a reason the Panthers were ready when the phone rang, whether they realized it at the time or not.

That same Sunday, they beat the Saints to improve to 3-0.

But starting defensive end Charles Johnson suffered a severe hamstring injury that day, bad enough to land him on injured reserve and knock him out for half the season. They were still deep enough from front to back on defense to sustain, but that team felt something special, so they weren't taking any chances.

And even though he was in significant pain at that moment, Johnson realized it too.

"I knew we had a good team, and I knew I was going to be out for eight weeks," Johnson said. "You know your personnel, who you got here, so I knew we needed it at the time, and I was happy because I was like, man, this guy is good. I watched him for so many years, and I was like, this guy's good. He's tremendous. I'm going to pick his brain, everything. As soon as he got here, that's exactly what I did."

And Johnson didn't have to wait long.

Then-Panthers general manager Dave Gettleman had huddled with a handful of people, including assistant general manager Brandon Beane (now the GM of the Buffalo Bills), in the aftermath of the Johnson injury, to try to figure out what came next.

"We watched him, and you know, yes, he's nearing the end, but he's still got something left," Beane recalled of the quick scouting meeting. "This guy's a Hall of Famer, knows how to rush, and to add another guy to us, it was like adding another Peanut Tillman-type person who's played at a Hall of Fame level and could add another rusher to our group. It just made too much sense for us. We felt we had a good team, and we can never have enough rush.

"We definitely watched the film, talked about it, what he does well, what he doesn't. The coaches watched him, and we knew we were adding a leader and a guy who still knows how to rush."

Then-coach Ron Rivera just laughed when Gettleman mentioned the possibility to him.

"Oh yeah, absolutely," he replied when asked if he would be interested.

He had coached Allen in the Pro Bowl previously, and he knew the effort that Allen had put into the preparation for a meaningless all-star game.

"I heard a lot of good things," Rivera said. "I'd actually watched the way he practiced in the Pro Bowl, and I know it upset some of the other guys that are in the Pro Bowl.

"But hey, he was serious, and so I knew he was going to be serious with us."

Likewise, defensive coordinator Sean McDermott, now the head coach of the Buffalo Bills, was, shall we say, enthusiastic about the possibility.

"We needed to find some help, and I'm not going to pretend to know everything there because, you know, being the coordinator, I was involved. But wasn't the head coach or the GM, so a little bit of a roof on my knowledge here," McDermott said. "But you know, they said, hey, we're targeting Jared, and I'm like, 'Yeah.'"

There was a part of the Bears front office at the time that was hesitant. Fox has always been a pragmatist; it's part of what made him such a successful coach. And everyone kind of knew the 3-4 he was running with defensive coordinator Vic Fangio wasn't a perfect fit for the 33-year-old Allen's skills.

But effectively forced into making a quick deal, the Bears were still hoping for a moment.

When Allen was asked if Fox told him anything about Charlotte, where he coached for eight successful years and one messy one, the soon-to-be Hall of Famer just laughed.

"Nothing, he just said, 'All right, well, we're going to have to make it seem like this is our idea because we don't want a mass exodus,'" Allen recalled. "Ryan Pace is like Jared, you're my favorite player. I don't want to trade you. I was like, Ryan, you're a young GM. I'm old, I'm retiring, get some draft picks, you're going to need them.

"I love them both. I've got so much respect for Fox and Ryan Pace, and so, again, the opportunity to let me finish my career the way I started it, right? I was never going to be a 3-4 stand-up linebacker. So for them to let me have my hand back in the dirt, that was big."

As this process was becoming clearer, the amount of time required was shrinking, as was the price.

Pressed for details on a decade-old transaction, Beane was fuzzy at first on the asking price.

"It wasn't much, maybe a four, then a five," he recalled.

In a short amount of time, it became a sixth in 2016.

How short?

"At the end of the day, maybe three phone calls," Gettleman said. "It doesn't take long, you know. Over the course of my GM career, I did plenty of big, big deals, OK? And the god's honest truth is if both parties come to the table ready to negotiate, you can do those in three. They were motivated, we were motivated, and it didn't take long."

"Their GM was Ryan Pace, who I knew really well. I said, 'Ryan, I like to think I'm a reasonable man.' So the two of us got together and really made it happen quickly."

By noon on Monday, less than 12 hours after the Bears' plane landed from Seattle, and while Johnson was getting initial treatment inside Bank of America Stadium, the deal was done.

That sixth-round pick ended up being No. 206 overall, thanks to the Panthers going 15-1 and being next-to-last in draft order. And the Bears did find it useful, packaging it the following spring with their own No. 117 to move up four spots in the fourth round of the 2016 draft to take West Virginia linebacker Nick Kwiatkowski. He would start 22 games for them in the following four seasons.

Allen started much more than that, because as the news of his arrival in Charlotte began to spread, a ripple of excitement began to move through a locker room filled with veterans and stars. This was a hard bunch to impress, but they were. And that team didn't need much more in the way of confidence, but hearing the acquired Allen was still a boost.

"I think it showed us, hey, we're serious about winning games right now, right?" star inside linebacker Luke Kuechly said. "When you go trade for a guy in-season like Jared Allen, it tells the guys, hey, they're serious about what we're trying to do. We've got a good team. They're going to try to keep it a good team."

Even entering a room full of greats, Allen made an impression as soon as he walked in the door.

"That's the thing, it's wild to think about as good as that team was and as high a level as everybody was playing at, that you can even go find somebody like that who's available at the moment to be on that team," said defensive tackle Kawann Short, who would make the All-Pro team that year, and the first of his two Pro Bowls. "It was the right place, right time. And it was just an honor to even meet him. I had never met him, never saw him before, then he walks in, it's like there's another Hall of Famer. It's wild."

The reality was Allen was obviously declining as a player — he was coming off a career-low 5.5 sacks the previous season with the Bears — but his name still had cache.

This was the cowboy riding in. The Panthers had roped the cowboy, and they did it in a hurry, and they did it on the cheap.

"That was a cool moment," running back Jonathan Stewart said. "That's also a moment where you realize, like, hey, we've got something special. This guy wants to come and play for us and see if he can get a shot to get the ring. And he's choosing us, right?

"Jared was a guy that knew ball; he was respected. I remember seeing him for the first time in the locker room, seeing how he prepped, he was just so relaxed about being in this workplace environment. It was something that a lot of the younger guys needed to see, right? You have this vet that's like, 'Hey man, I'm on my last wheel here.' And to give this charisma and charm to that locker room, basically gave us this confidence that even though Charles was down, it was exactly what this team needed."

It was also what Allen needed.

After landing from Seattle around 3 a.m. after a brutal loss, he was on a plane to Charlotte before the sun went down again, taking a physical in Charlotte on Tuesday morning, and hitting the practice field on Wednesday.

"Man, what a fantastic run in '15, I could not have asked for a better way to end my career. Even though we lost the Super Bowl, that group of guys and the amount of fun we had. Coach Rivera, Brandon Beane, all those guys, Sean McDermott. You see the success Buffalo is having, and it's not a shock whatsoever because the quality of people they were, and it made football really fun."

For a guy who had exactly 2.0 sacks with the Panthers, he's used that word a lot since being chosen for the Hall of Fame.

But that's how much his short time in Charlotte meant to him, as he prepares to enter a new home — one for football eternity.

"I got to Carolina and joy, joy got brought back into football," Allen said. "You know what, honestly, my last couple of years in Minnesota, from a fun standpoint, it wasn't that fun playing football, right? I mean, because we had lost, we had several coaching changes, and we were going through another coaching change at the tail end, and so I went to Chicago. I just wanted to have fun. I wanted to win football games, and have fun playing, and then when I got to Chicago, I ended up being part of an organization that got gutted after my first year there. Again, I was like, oh my goodness.

"So I laugh when I look back at it now. I always say this. It was the worst production there I've ever had, and I went through injury. ... But when I would come home, I was like we were having fun. Like football was fun again."

And all it took was about three phone calls and a sixth-round pick.