JACKSONVILLE — A lot has changed since 2018.

Back then, a young and wide-eyed Tre’Davious White was one of the key pieces in Sean McDermott’s first season as Buffalo Bills head coach, and the cornerback helped McDermott deliver the team’s first playoff appearance, breaking a 17-year postseason drought. There they went to EverBank Stadium in Jacksonville, inexperienced in the playoff arena, and fell to those Jaguars.

But sometimes, things have a way of coming full circle.

McDermott has taken his battle scars with one road playoff loss after the next, and White, just five days shy of his 31st birthday, has been on a journey that would have ended many players’ NFL careers. There they were, together, eight years later, in an ever-so-poetic moment in the very same EverBank Stadium.

Buffalo clung to a three-point lead against the Jaguars with one minute to play and needed a defensive stop to give the McDermott-led Bills their first road playoff win 2,926 days after that distant loss — and to end another playoff drought. The franchise hadn’t won a postseason road game in 33 seasons.

As if it were a carefully crafted movie script ready to play out in real time, it almost had to be White making the play to send the Bills to a 27-24 wild-card win and on their way to a sixth straight AFC Divisional round.

On his very first dropback with under one minute to play, Jaguars quarterback Trevor Lawrence attempted to fire a pass to Jakobi Meyers. White was in man coverage on Meyers, had a step and a beat on the ball, and closed down on the ball as it zoomed toward the receiver. White helped deflect the pass into the air, where second-year safety Cole Bishop roped it in for the game-clinching interception.

Game over.

“I don’t even know how to feel right now,” White said. “I’m just trying to be in the moment with my teammates, just trying to enjoy it and not think about too much of the ins and outs of it, but man, it’s huge. Huge for myself, huge to the team, huge for Buffalo, and it’s a step in the right direction going towards our ultimate goal, which is to win the Super Bowl.”

The parallel nature of Buffalo’s wild-card victory in the same stadium where White and McDermott’s playoff journey began with the Bills is rare in sports.

“I didn’t even think about that. That’s crazy,” said nickel Taron Johnson of White’s Jacksonville-to-Jacksonville playoff journey. “That’s dope as hell to be back in this moment, what is it, eight years later? I mean, it’s special.”

Johnson, almost as well as anyone in the Bills locker room, knows what White has gone through over the year. White is Johnson’s close friend and even stood in his wedding. He knows what this moment means to White.

“It just shows his resiliency and his love for the game as well, because he wants to be great,” Johnson said. “Even when you come off an injury… but you work your way back to that level, and, he’s here.”