ALLEN PARK — He was asked about his falling out with Sean McVay. About being left for dead by Los Angeles. About being traded for Matthew Stafford. About seeing all that this week in an elimination game for the ages.

Jared Goff was peppered repeatedly about Los Angeles. And he didn’t really bite on any of it.

While the world is obsessed with the subplots of Lions-Rams, he’s all about Detroit.

“Obviously there’s a personal connection there,” Goff said. “Not just for me, but for a lot of our players and some of theirs as well. But, no, I think — I so badly want to win a game for this city and win a playoff game for this city that hasn’t had one in so long. We’ve got a home playoff game for the first time in so long, and that’s so much more important than anything. Personally, for me, I want to be a part of this win and do my job the best

The third-seeded Lions (12-5) will host the sixth-seeded Rams (10-7) in a wild-card game on Sunday night at Ford Field. Which you surely know by now. The Lions have waited 30 years to host a playoff game, and now they have it, putting this memorable season on the line in the first elimination game ever in that building — and the man standing in their way is the best quarterback in the modern era of their franchise.

Storylines don’t get much juicier than that, and Lions-Rams has become one of the hottest tickets in the history of the wild-card round. Matthew Stafford has dominated headlines ahead of his first game back at Ford Field, where he played some great football over 12 years, but could never raise the banner that will now cast a shadow on him from the rafters on Sunday night — as a crowd that is still dominated by his No. 9 jersey tries to grapple with seeing No. 9 gunning for their season.

The scriptwriters were in their bag for this one.

But as Stafford draws the spotlight this week, it’s kind of poetic that Goff has become something of a side story. The blockbuster trade was never about him in the first place, after all. Stafford wanted out of Detroit before yet another rebuild set in, and Los Angeles prized him for a Super Bowl run. Then-incoming Lions general manager Brad Holmes pulled off the deal, choosing L.A.’s package over Carolina’s and others because of the extra first-round pick he was able to pry away from the Rams.

The draft capital turned into young stars like Sam LaPorta, Jahmyr Gibbs and Jameson Williams, while Ifeatu Melifonwu played a critical role in stabilizing the Lions during a midseason swoon, including picking off the pass that clinched the division title in Minnesota three weeks ago. The Lions probably wouldn’t be here without them.

But they definitely wouldn’t be here without the rebirth of Jared Goff.

He was taken first overall by the Rams in 2016, then took them all the way to the Super Bowl by the end of his third season. But he fell on hard times after that, and turned over the football more times than any other player in the league in 2019-20.

McVay lost faith in Goff, benched him late in the 2020 season and then unceremoniously traded him away for Stafford and three draft picks, including two first-rounders. He was drinking champagne with Stafford and their wives in Cabo before the ink was dry on the deal, and Goff — who had taken McVay all the way to the Super Bowl — fumed over the way the trade was handled.

“The thing I’ll never run from is the mistakes I made in previous instances,” McVay told reporters in Los Angeles on Wednesday. “But when you look back on it, the gratitude for those four years, all the good memories we had, and then when we ended up making change, it was difficult. Could it have been handled better on my end? Absolutely, and I’ll never run away from that. He deserved better than the way it all went down, I’ll acknowledge that, and I think he knows that too. I’m not afraid to admit to those things. But I think we’re all better for going through those things. I know I have more appreciation for him as time goes on.”

Goff clearly had hard feelings at the time, and requested an exit interview with McVay despite the trade. He wanted McVay to tell him to his face what he had done wrong.

Now all these years later, Goff has no interest in revisiting the messy divorce.

“Sean and I are good,” Goff said. “I think he’s a great coach. Obviously we had our differences there at the end, but he’s a great coach. He’s done a lot of great things, and he’s a guy that taught me a lot.”

Of course, the way he’s played has helped heal old wounds.

Goff arrived in Detroit with a chip firmly on his shoulder. He knew what the Rams thought about him, and what the world thought about him too. He was viewed externally as a once-promising star who was made great by Sean McVay, fell off a cliff and his days as a franchise quarterback would ultimately end whenever Detroit — now armed with five first-round picks over the next three years — eventually selected his successor.

But the Lions gave him something that McVay didn’t in those final years: Faith.

The Lions believed Goff could be saved, and never wavered off him as QB1, even as the struggles mounted and the howls grew in his first half-season in Detroit. Those initial weeks and months were hard, but after Dan Campbell took over the playcalling in the middle of that 2021 season — and Ben Johnson became passing game coordinator — Goff finished the year as one of the hottest quarterbacks in the league.

Once Johnson took over the offense the following offseason, he sat with Goff for a series of film sessions to build the new offense together. Johnson wanted Goff to feel ownership of what they were doing. More than anything, he wanted to repair the confidence that had eroded over the previous couple years.

It worked. Goff piloted a top-five offense last season, finished among the 10-best quarterbacks according to all the major metrics and wound up back in the Pro Bowl for the third time in his career. Campbell said he believed Goff was playing even better than his L.A. days.

“He is a better quarterback than he was there, in my opinion,” Campbell said. “Because he can do more things. He is mentally on it. I mean we have come lightyears ahead of where he was two years ago.”

Goff’s growing confidence was obvious, and he emerged as a leader of one of the youngest teams in the league. This year, he might have played his best ball yet, throwing for the second-most yards (4,575) and the fourth-most touchdowns (30) in the league, while finishing with the fifth-best completion percentage (67.3) and the ninth-best passer rating (97.9).

Detroit had the No. 3 passing game in the league, and the No. 2 offense overall.

Jared Goff is back and then some, the single biggest reason the Lions won a franchise-record 12 games and secured the first home playoff game since 1993. Now while the world obsesses over his rematch with Sean McVay and the team that gave up on him in the first place, he’s obsessed with something else: Winning Detroit’s first playoff game since 1991.

“It’s exciting,” Goff said. “It’s been a goal of mine since I got here. Seeing the opportunity to be a part of something that’s from the ground up and to be able to be where we’re standing right now and have the chance to win the Super Bowl is pretty exciting. We’ve got a long way to go, and the Rams are the first team in our way, and we’ve got to go handle business. But yeah, it’s been a long road to this point, and it’s a long road ahead as well.”