The Green Bay Packers blown lead problem did not stay in last season's file cabinet. It reported for work in Week 1, right on schedule, and the final read 39-22 Minnesota.

I do not have the full drive chart in front of me yet, and honestly you do not need it to know what happened. A team is up big. A team loses by 17. Whatever the lead actually was, the swing between the high point and the horn is enormous, and it did not happen in one play. Collapses that size are never one play. They are a sequence: a drive that stalls, a stop that does not come, a possession that gets answered too fast, and then the part where everybody on the sideline starts pressing because the math has flipped and everyone in the stadium can feel it.

Why do the Packers keep blowing leads?

Because a repeat is not variance, it is character. One blown lead is a bad Sunday. A blown lead that carries over from an entire previous season into the very first game of the next one is a trait, and traits show up in the tape long before they show up in the box score. Late-game football is the most coachable part of the sport: clock, situational calls, tackling in space, whether the offense keeps playing forward with a cushion or starts trying to run out a game that has too much time left on it.

That is the thing about leads. They are not a possession, they are a responsibility.

The cruelest part for Green Bay is that the shape of Sunday will be used as evidence for everything anyone already believed about this team. Good enough to get ahead of anybody. Not yet trusted to stay there. That reputation is expensive, and the only currency that buys it back is a fourth quarter where nothing interesting happens.

What a Week 1 division loss means for Green Bay

Division games are the ones that come back around in January as tiebreakers, and this one went to a team that shares the North with them. Green Bay now has to make it up somewhere.

And it is not a quiet neighborhood. Elsewhere in the division on the same Sunday, Chicago walked out of its opener with a 59-37 win over Carolina, the fourth-most points in Bears franchise history and 96 combined points, the most ever in a season opener. So the North announced itself with a 39-22 collapse and a scoreboard that looked like a typo. Nobody in that division is going to be allowed to win ugly and slow.

checked the almanac: green bay and minnesota have been playing each other twice a year since the vikings came into the league in 1961, and twice in the past dozen-plus seasons they have played to a tie at lambeau. that is what this rivalry does. it finds the strangest possible way to end a football game.

What comes next for the Packers

The locker room answer is always the same and it is always correct: it is one game, it is September, the tape is fixable. All true. The harder truth is that a team with a late-game reputation does not get to talk its way out of it. It has to play its way out, and the only proof that counts is a close fourth quarter that ends boring.

What I am watching next is narrow and specific. First, the possession immediately after Green Bay takes a lead in the second half of its next game, because that is where last season's tape and Sunday's tape rhymed. Second, the defensive snaps in the last eight minutes, tackling in particular, because leads do not evaporate on explosive plays alone, they leak out on missed wraps and free yardage after contact. Third, the tone from the building this week. Teams that fix this usually get very plain and very specific about it. Teams that do not start using the word "execution" a lot.

One Sunday does not define a season. It does define a question, and Green Bay has to answer it out loud.