It was a week before Christmas at TCO Performance Center, and as the Vikings prepared for a road game against the Seahawks, head coach Kevin O’Connell was given a chance to look big picture.

With the Vikings boasting a 12-2 record at the time, O’Connell was asked if he would ever consider addressing with his players the possibility of winning the NFC North, and potentially earning the No. 1 seed in the NFC playoffs.

HIs response was predictable for anybody who has been following the Vikings closely this season.

“I think it’ll come when we have an opportunity to do that,” O’Connell said with a smile. “We won’t have an opportunity to do that, probably, until we have an opportunity to go 1-0 that week.”

Naturally, after the Vikings scored a dramatic 27-24 win over the Seahawks at Lumen Field in Seattle, O’Connell was asked if he had now started to let himself think about could happen if they won the next couple of games on their schedule.

“You’re lobbing it right at the rim,” O”Connell said with another smile. “We can’t go 2-0 without going 1-0.”

It’s a cliché often overused across sports but the idea of simply going 1-0 each week has come to define the Vikings throughout their unexpected journey that suddenly has them on the precipice of, yes, winning the NFC North, and, yes, earning the No. 1 seed in the NFC playoffs.

It has become part of the zeitgeist in the Twin Cities to the point that quarterback Sam Darnold can’t escape it wherever he goes.

“It’s pretty incredible,” Darnold said. “Just random people will come up to me, like, ‘Hey, we’re 1-0 this week, man.’ It’s awesome, just the way the entire community has embraced this team and our mindset with everything.”

The mindset was put into action long before the pivotal matchup between the Vikings and the Lions on Sunday night at Ford Field in Detroit. It started back in training camp at TCO Performance Center, when many analysts predicted the Vikings to be among the worst teams in the NFL.

As he thought about how he wanted to approach this season, O’Connell decided he would keep the focus on how much he believed in his players rather than fixating on everybody that didn’t believe in them.

That belief from O’Connell manifested itself throughout organized team activities in the spring and training camp in the summer.

All the while O’Connell consistently hammered home the importance of being surgical in their preparation. In order for the Vikings to literally go 1-0 against the Giants to start this season, he told his players, they had figuratively go 1-0 in everything they did leading up to the game itself.

Though he joked that cliché might have induced some eye rolls in the early stages, O’Connell slowly started see his players buy in.

“I think it’s a byproduct of me being consistent with that message,” O’Connell said. “It does feel in a lot of ways like our players have taken that on as an identity of our team.”

No longer is it O’Connell preaching the message alone. As the Vikings have stacked wins this season, more and more players have taken it upon themselves to highlight the importance of 1-0 in meetings, walkthroughs, and practices.

“We talk about it all the time,” Darnold said. “It’s a way of life.”

All of those little victories can lead to sustainable success. That much the Vikings have proven as they have established themselves as legitimate Super Bowl contenders.

“We’ve really bought in,” tight end T.J. Hockenson said. “Nobody believed in us at the beginning, so it was like, ‘Hey, let’s go 1-0, and see what happens.’ We’ve continued that throughout this season. That’s what we’re going to continue to do.”

As he reflected on the mindset that helped the Vikings get to where they are now, running back Aaron Jones summed up it by saying, “This was forged in the dark.”

“That work that we put in during the time when nobody was talking about us is really what made us,” Jones said. “They still haven’t wanted to talk about us this season, and now we’ve given them no choice.”

The fact that everybody has suddenly started to talk about the Vikings won’t change their approach of trying to go 1-0 each week.

Not only will the Vikings carry that mindset with them heading into the heavyweight fight with the Lions this weekend, they will continue to carry that mindset with them wherever they go in the playoffs.

“You have to keep everything routine because that’s what got us here,” safety Josh Metellus said. “If we tried to switch everything up now, we’d be doing a disservice to ourselves.”

That was on display in the locker room at U.S. Bank Stadium last weekend after the Vikings defeated the Packers. As he celebrated the win with his teammates, right tackle Brian O’Neill was asked if he had started to think about what was on the line when the Vikings played the Lions.

“It’s another chance to go 1-0,” O’Neill said with a smile. “The game is the game. You either win it or lose it. You can’t really think about anything else.”

Fittingly, if the Vikings go 1-0 this week against the Lions, everything will take care of itself.

“It’s not a bad strategy,” O’Connell said. “It’s much more than a cliché to this team.”

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