Nearby, teammates cleaned out their lockers at the end of a season that will perhaps be remembered most for an opportunity missed. Xavier Rhodes was asked to stop and ponder, at least for a brief second, the idea that time will not wait on these Vikings.
"No, man," the veteran cornerback said when asked if he was worried about the age of the Vikings defense. "We're fine like wine."
Aging might bring benefits in viticulture, but it's tended not to do so in the NFL. And as the Vikings try again to fortify their offensive line and chart a direction forward with their third permanent offensive coordinator in three years, they will also have to be mindful of the fact their window to win — at least with the core players they have acquired, developed and paid handsomely — isn't going to be any wider than it is right now.
Though Kirk Cousins only turns 31 this year — still relatively young for a quarterback — Riley Reiff will be 31 in December, and Mike Remmers turns 30 in April. Kyle Rudolph will be 30 in November, and Adam Thielen — who was 26 when he became a starter — turns 29 in August.
On defense, Everson Griffen turns 32 in December. Linval Joseph will be 31 in October and Harrison Smith turns 30 in February. Sheldon Richardson, who is scheduled to hit free agency in March, also turns 29 in November. Rhodes — who played 90 percent of the Vikings' defensive snaps in 2017 but dropped to 74 percent because of injuries in 2018 — turns 29 in June.
Pro Football Reference's Approximate Value metric, which attempts to put a number valuation on every player's season since 1950, can provide a general idea of how a certain group of players performed in relation to another.
From 2000 to '17, 834 defensive players posted an AV of 12 or better in a season; in other words, those players were generally among the top 50 defensive players in the league each year. Only 221 of those players were in their 30s, and just 95 were 32 or older.
Thanks to such quarterbacks as Tom Brady, Drew Brees, Peyton Manning, Ben Roethlisberger and Brett Favre, it's slightly more common to have top-end offensive players in their 30s; 235 of the 751 players with AVs of 12 or better were in their 30s, with 119 of them at least 32. The numbers make painfully clear, though, the point that aging players tend to feel most pointedly when contract negotiations come around: The NFL is a young man's league.