Five years ago, Cooper Kupp reached the mountain top as a member of the Los Angeles Rams. Ten months ago, the Rams released Kupp in salary cap-saving move, resulting in him becoming a free agent, with the Seahawks quickly moving to sign him.

Now, in his first season with the Seahawks, he's trying to end his former team's season while helping the Seahawks back to the Super Bowl for the first time in 11 years.

And not only was Kupp a member of that 2021 Rams team that won the Super Bowl team, he was one of its most valuable players, recording 1,947 receiving yards, the second most in a single season in league history, along with 145 catches and 16 touchdowns, both league highs, before winning Super Bowl MVP honors after catching eight passes for 92 yards and two touchdowns to help the Rams beat the Bengals in Super Bowl LVI.

Now, when he faces the Rams in the NFC championship game, he'll be just the fifth former Super Bowl MVP to face the team with which he won that award in a postseason game, joining Richard Dent, Peyton Manning, Santonio Holmes and Von Miller.

And if we're talking compelling Cooper Kupp storylines, throw in the fact that he'll be playing this NFC championship game in his home state, having grown up in Yakima, staring at AC Davis High School then Eastern Washington University before kicking off a long NFL career in 2017.

But for all the strong bonds Kupp built over his eight seasons in Los Angeles, many of them with current key pieces of this year's team, most notably quarterback Matthew Stafford and head coach Sean McVay, Kupp's focus isn't on facing his former team, but rather on helping his current one win another game.

"You take things one day at a time," Kupp said when asked if envisioned a scenario like this when he signed with Seattle. "I've touched on this a little bit, we all have a story. All these guys here that step on this field, they've all had a story to get them to this point. They've all had a journey of what this year has been, what the last few years have been to come to this point. Mine is just one of 53 that are going to be on that field. And my story, this is an unbelievable storyline, the chances of this ends up being what it is, and I'm really excited about that.

"But this is the Seahawks going into an NFC Championship game and trying to get the job done. So that's the great thing about football. It's all these guys. All these guys have different stories, and we all get to play for one another. It's a powerful thing when all 50 guys are playing for a why, playing for their purpose, but it's even more powerful when you're playing for the guys next to you and you're playing for the people lining up alongside you. And that's what I'm excited about is the guys that are in this room that you want to go out there and win for, the coaches that put so much time into this that you want to go and execute your job for. And we've got a lot of guys that live that, that are about it. And that's what makes this a really exciting thing for me."

Kupp's first season in Seattle has seen him take on a reduced role compared to what he did for most of his career in Los Angeles, both because the Seahawks threw the ball at one of the lowest rates in the NFL, and because of the emergence of Jaxon Smith-Njigba, who led the league with 1,793 receiving yards. Yet as Kupp showed in last weekend's divisional round win over the 49ers, leading the team with five catches for 60 yards, nearly half the team's receiving yards in the game, he is still a very talented receiver when the ball does come his way.

Surely, Kupp thought he would probably have ended up with more than the 47 catches, 593 yards and two touchdowns he had in the regular season, but he isn't complaining about his role, not when he, his teammates and coaches all know how vital he has been to the team's success in ways that don't show up on the stat sheet, and particularly not when he's one win away from playing in the Super Bowl for the second time in his career..

"At the end of the day, I'm going to go out there and execute what's asked of me," Kupp said. "As anyone would, everyone wants to come in here and have 1,500 yards in a year, everyone wants to score 10 touchdowns. You want the ball in your hands. But ultimately my job is to do what that play call says to do, and to execute it to the best of my possible ability. And I take a lot of pride in that and being an asset for the coaches and being a tool. When I'm sitting in these chairs with these guys, being someone that the coaches want to get something done, whether the pass game, the run game, screen, whatever it is, being able to execute your job. So, no, I would say, no, it hasn't gone production-(wise) what everyone comes in and hopes that it's going to be, but it has been just for the success that we have had and what we've been able to do here, that has been the vision. And so I've been ecstatic to be a part of it, to come in here every single day and be a part of working towards that goal. It's been exactly what I've wanted it to be."

The Seahawks have been equally ecstatic to have Kupp helping lead the team. Not only does he pass on knowledge to his position group and to the offense, he's someone whose understanding of the game is such that he's an asset to the coaching staff as well. Add to that the fact that Kupp, for all of his accomplishments, is still one of the league's best run-blocking receivers—as Jake Bobo put it, 'we've all been in the Cooper Kupp school of receiver run blocking for the last couple of months'—and you have a player that consistently finds ways to make his team better even when the ball isn't finding him as frequently as it has in past seasons.

"He's a force multiplier for us, especially in the receiver room," Seahawks coach Mike Macdonald said, bestowing one of the highest compliments he gives to players. "It's like his expertise of the game is fascinating to me. Great teachers can make all these different things very simple. So he has just a really great way to explain these things to our guys and a guy like me can understand, where that's not really my thing. And so I can imagine how that would help guys that actually can do that type of stuff. And so it's exciting. It makes it really come to life for those guys."

Said offensive coordinator Klint Kubiak, "I've learned a lot from Cooper. He's teaching me things every week, bringing ideas to our staff that we use every Sunday. He's a phenomenal Hall-of-Fame brain and a guy that's made a lot of plays for us. Gets a lot of credit for the way he blocks and he should, but he has made some really big plays in the pass game and we're going to keep relying on him there."