What wildness awaits Packers out west?

GREEN BAY – Of course the trip is to Arizona.

Where else would the Packers be heading for a big game without two of their best receivers and their defensive coordinator, being forced to adjust on the fly on both sides of the ball, on a short week no less, to face the NFL’s only undefeated team?

If there’s a place where Packers games reach the height of insanity, it’s what is now called State Farm Stadium in Glendale.

Six years ago, Green Bay’s situation at receiver wasn’t much different in the 2015 NFC Divisional playoff. Jordy Nelson had been out for the whole year, Davante Adams got injured the week before in the wild-card round, and then Randall Cobb exited late in the first quarter after making a spectacular, one-handed catch of a 50-yard rainbow while falling on his back.

Not only did the incredible grab not count because of an offensive penalty, but Cobb punctured a lung on the play, possibly caused by the sound device being worn under his jersey as a mic’d up player for NFL Films.

“It’s probably the best one that never, uh, happened,” Cobb recalled this week, ranking the catch as the greatest of his career.

So while Cobb spent the second half at a Phoenix hospital feeling “like Gerry Bertier (in ‘Remember the Titans’) … kicking nurses out” of his room while watching the rest of the game, Aaron Rodgers was down to James Jones, Jeff Janis and Jared Abbrederis at receiver with the season on the line.

Then a fourth-and-20 bomb followed by a Hail Mary, both to Janis, sent the game to overtime, only to see future Hall of Famer Larry Fitzgerald dash the Packers’ dreams of a playoff miracle.

“What a wild finish that was to that one,” Rodgers said.

Just as crazy was the playoff game six years before that, Rodgers’ first in the postseason, the 2009 NFC Wild Card contest.

Rodgers threw an interception on the game’s first play, Donald Driver fumbled on the Packers’ third offensive snap, and the Cardinals had a 14-0 lead less than six minutes in.

Green Bay’s deficit ballooned to 31-10 early in the third quarter, “and then back we came,” Rodgers said.

The Packers got two touchdowns sandwiched around a successful onside kick. While Cardinals QB Kurt Warner was throwing his fourth and fifth TD passes of the game (against just four incompletions), the Packers kept answering as second-year tight end Jermichael Finley set a (then) franchise postseason record with 159 receiving yards and little-known Spencer Havner caught a TD pass.