Packers' Aaron Rodgers: Opportunities to win a second Super Bowl 'are getting fewer'

Quarterback Aaron Rodgers guided the Green Bay Packers to a Super Bowl XLV victory over the Pittsburgh Steelers in February 2011 but hasn't returned to pro football's biggest stage again even though he is a four-time regular-season Most Valuable Player who has won the award for each of the past two campaigns. 

Rodgers admitted during an exclusive interview with Sky Sports ahead of the upcoming "Sunday Night Football" matchup versus the 1-0 Chicago Bears that waiting to win a second ring has, to steal the song lyric, been the hardest part. 

"It's too long ago," Rodgers explained. "It was so special, like a blur that week. I was 27 years old and thought that this was the standard, that we were going to get back here many, many times and win more of these trophies. Especially as you get older, you realize the windows are getting smaller and the opportunities are getting fewer." 

Most recently, Rodgers and the 2021 Packers lost a home playoff contest to the San Francisco 49ers 13-10 this past January. As Bill Bender noted for Sporting News, the future Hall of Famer is 1-4 in career NFC Championship games.

"I'm always thinking about plays I could have made, things I could have done better," Rodgers said about past postseason losses. "It's tough. The finality of it is always difficult, the swiftness with which it comes on — that you're done. And there's an implicit knowledge that this is the last time this group is going to ever be together.

"It's never going to be the same. We're never going to be the same people, there's going to be changes, not everybody is going to be a part of this moving forward, there's coaches, players that will leave — they'll get traded, cut or retire."

Rodgers signed a massive contract extension with the Packers in March but then confessed in June that he thinks about retirement "all the time." One wonders if the 38-year-old is already questioning if the 0-1 Packers have the goods to play on Super Bowl Sunday a handful of months down the road.