'Finish the game for him:' Lions persevere for Jack Campbell. Now they pray for him.

Ford Field had fallen to a hush. As the cart carrying Jack Campbell drove across the turf, the roar of a lion crackled through the stadium speakers. As Campbell was transported up the tunnel, motionless and strapped to a backboard, the intro to Hells Bells tolled for his teammates on the field: it was fourth and 5, the Vikings were going for it, and the Lions needed a stop. Aidan Hutchinson was blinking tears from his eyes as he put his helmet back on and buckled up for the biggest play of the game.

Suddenly, the crowd was roaring again. The ball was snapped. Hutchinson flew off the right edge of the defensive line around the left tackle, Derrick Barnes stormed through the running back on a blitz and the two leaders of Detroit's defense in the absence of Campbell pressured Murray into a back-foot throw to Jordan Addison that D.J. Reed knocked away. Hutchinson leveled Murray, then flexed his arms as he came to his feet.

To the Lions, said Hutchinson, Jack Campbell is everything, "captain, leader, teammate, husband, father." For the rest of the game, he was also an inspiration.

"You’re filled with a lot of emotions," said Hutchinson. "We're in the huddle, more united than we’d ever been before that play, and then I get a good rush on that fourth down. It’s a weird dynamic, between football being a game, and then you snap out of it to seeing a dude getting carted off, and then you’re right back in it ... No one really teaches you how to go in and out of that stuff."

The offense took the field, the Lions leading 12-7 with about 12 minutes to play. The first words in the huddle, said Amon-Ra St. Brown, were, "Let’s do this for Jack. Let’s win this game for Jack." Easier said than done. But then, this is how Jack Campbell would like it, a struggle to the finish, each teammate lifting the other.

"Especially in the middle of a close game like that," said St. Brown, "you shift your mindset to, you hope he’s OK. You’re not even thinking about the game anymore. They cart him off, and then it’s like, OK, we gotta go back to playing football. That’s really the hardest part, is trying to be a human and then having to be a football player again. But this is what we get paid to do, to play football, so at the end of the day we gotta go out there and do our job. But there’s still that human element."

The Lions went three and out after a frustrating series ended in a couple penalties and a punt. For the short time that the offense was on the field, the defense circled up on the sideline, arms draped over each other's shoulders. In the center of the group were Hutchinson and defensive coordinator Kelvin Sheppard. The message, from one man to the next, was simple, said Barnes: "It’s time to do this for Jack. It’s time to step up and take the leadership role and finish the game for him."

Jack Campbell loves the game of football because it's excruciatingly hard. It's both unsympathetic and emotionally draining. It doesn't really care about sentiment. The smarter, tougher, more physical team will win. Detroit's defense went back on the field desperate to do right by their teammate and surrendered a seven-play, 84-yard touchdown drive, topped off by a two-point conversion.

Detroit's defense was bleeding on Sunday, the injuries like bullet holes. Brian Branch knocked himself and D.J. Wonnum out of the game on the same play with a friendly fire head-to-head collision where Branch was aiming for Justin Jefferson. Rookie linebacker Jimmy Rolder went down on the same play as Campbell. Even Reed left briefly with a hip injury. The losses took their toll.

On the Vikings' go-ahead drive, Murray launched a 51-yard pass to Addison with Khalil Dorsey in coverage; safety Chuck Clark was flat-footed and slow to react. With Hutchinson getting a rare breather on the play, Detroit's edge rushers were Tyler Lacy and rookie Derrick Moore. On the go-ahead touchdown a couple plays later, backup nickel Christian Izien was beaten cleanly by T.J. Hockenson for a pitch and catch. On the ensuing two-point conversion, Addison was wide open thanks to a blown coverage.

"We had a lot of bodies that went down," Hutchinson would say, "so we were just trying to get the job done with the guys we had, for the guys we lost."

Even the offense lost starting center Cade Mays, a game after their big offseason acquisition had made his season debut. Meanwhile, the Vikings' defense was living up to every bit of the hype, harassing Jared Goff and smothering Detroit's run game for most of the first half. But the run game came alive in the second. The Lions got their tight ends and offensive linemen moving downhill, and Jahmyr Gibbs and Sione Vaki started to spring through the holes.

It was 15-12 Vikings when Detroit's offense came back on the field with about eight and a half minutes to play. The Lions would run 15 more plays and gain over 100 yards. The Vikings would run three, and gain five. The Lions rode Gibbs and Vaki down toward the end zone, then went to play-action. Goff hit Jameson Williams streaking across the back of the end zone to put Detroit back in front.

When Campbell was carted off the field, the whole team was in pain, said Williams. It would not be in vain.

"That was pretty hurtful to us. He’s a captain of this team. It just motivated us even more. We got a fourth down stop after that, the crowd was into it, and the offense went to go score. We just turned it up a notch for our brother," said Williams. "He goes out there and puts it on the line every single play for us, that’s why he’s got the C on his chest. We’re praying for him."

Second-year guard Tate Ratledge is as stoic as anyone on Detroit's roster. He plays the game with the meanness required in the trenches. Ratledge got choked up talking about Campbell after the game. He had to look to the ceiling to compose himself, taking a deep breath and pausing for several seconds. Campbell is a husband. He and his wife welcomed their first child this summer. Through a shaky voice, Ratledge said: "It's the bad part of this game."

"All you can do now is pray and hope for the best," he said.

And all the defense could do now was get a stop. On second down, linebacker Malcolm Rodriguez, in for Campbell, and rookie Skyler Gill-Howard teamed up to stuff a run. On third down, co-defensive captain Alim McNeill drove through the center and pressured Murray into an incompletion. The Vikings didn't touch the ball again.

In some ways, it felt wrong for the game to proceed so quickly after such a frightening injury. Campbell was whisked up the tunnel with the rest of his career -- the rest of his life -- in real question, and play resumed moments later. Goff called it "surreal." In other ways, Jack Campbell would never want the game to stop, certainly not on his behalf.

"To me," said Hutchinson, "that was exactly what we all said, at least what I was saying: Jack is such a ball guy, I know that he wouldn’t have wanted anything else than to lock back into this game, finish it and get a dub. And we did that."

Going into the game, said Ratledge, the offense had the mentality "that if we got the ball last, we were gonna end it." On Detroit's final two drives, Gibbs and Vaki averaged almost 10 yards a pop on nine carries. The Lions sealed it by running straight through the two minute warning and all three of Minnesota's timeouts. There was nothing the NFL's No. 1 defense could do to stop them. Jack Campbell would respect the fact that the smarter, tougher, more physical team won.

"When you get late into games like that and you don't want them getting the ball back, you know you gotta be able to run it," said Ratledge.

No one in the Lions' locker room is closer with Campbell than Sam LaPorta. They've been teammates for the past eight seasons, going back to their freshman season at Iowa. They were in each other's weddings. LaPorta couldn't bring himself to talk directly about Campbell after the game. It was too raw, and there was -- still is -- too much we don't know.

But LaPorta said the Lions were definitely playing for their brother from the moment he left the game.

"The emotional side of football, and having to separate that from doing your job and doing it well, is kind of shi**y because you want to sit there and mourn for your teammate. But they can’t stop the game unfortunately, so you gotta keep playing," LaPorta said. "It’s a sobering reminder that this business marches on, despite how we feel."

Dan Campbell said the mood in the locker room after Detroit's biggest victory of the season was "a little bittersweet." Everyone had questions, and the Lions didn't have many answers. The joy was hollowed out. Jack Campbell was transported to a local hospital, where he'll stay overnight "for continued evaluation and monitoring," per the team.

"If I know anyone that's tough enough to get through something like that," said Goff, "it's going to be him.”

The tight ends had a big hand in Detroit's reinvigorated rushing attack in the second half. LaPorta even got in on it on the clinching drive, taking a handoff two yards up the gut for a first down that forced the Vikings to burn their first timeout. When Goff converted a QB sneak for another first down that sealed the game a few plays later, LaPorta signaled down the field in satisfaction.

Asked afterward what Jack Campbell would like about the way the Lions responded to his injury, LaPorta said, "Our ability to persevere." Now they'll hope, and pray, that Campbell does the same.