CHARLOTTE — Bryce Young's favorite adverb, as you may have noticed, is "super."

He's often "super grateful" or "super excited." A trusted mentor who is "super helpful" that he's "super close" with becomes a relationship that's "super rare." That's why the construction that most often comes out of his mouth is "super blessed."

And if Bryce Young has a superpower, it's that ability to keep everything as consistent as his speech patterns, to never stray far from the plan he made for himself, to be the same person every day. In this just-completed season, that was super hard because the former No. 1 overall pick found himself on the bench two games into it before a comeback that only happened when it did because someone else was in a car wreck.

He's been asked a hundred times this season what changed. But perhaps the reason he was able to get back to the football that made him a No. 1 overall pick is that nothing changed and that he stayed true to the principles that he trusted, the ability to treat every day the same, whether it's a very public demotion or a climb that happened without the glare of nearly as much national attention.

He's super consistent.

Bryce Young keeps his focus on the thing in front of him. That makes him super difficult to mine for sound bites, but perhaps super prepared to do the slow work he had to do to reclaim his job and his role. So every time he was asked this year how it came to be, he refused to look too far back or too far ahead.

Now that it's the offseason, he admitted there will be time for him to reflect.

"Yeah, for sure, I think that's super important," Young said Monday as players packed up the baggage of a long and complicated season. "When that time comes just to be able to reflect on the year, just so I can grow as a person, as a player, as a leader, as a teammate, everything. I think it's super important. God gives us all these experiences, and I want to do all I can to honor that by learning from and reflecting on it. So yeah, it hasn't happened yet; we just got back from the game, and it hasn't been 24 hours yet.

"But eventually, for sure, there'll be a time I'll sit down. I'll watch every snap, I'll reflect on stuff on and off the field, and that'll definitely be part of the process."

And when he looks back on it, he's going to see a path that's super winding, and perhaps someday super rewarding.

It would be impossible to overstate just how badly this all started for Bryce Young in Carolina — his rookie season, or the follow-up.

He was drafted into a situation that left him with an interim coach the week after Thanksgiving. His play-caller changed four times over the course of a season. In the NFL, the situation a player is drafted into is often determinative, and Young was dropped into chaos not of his making.

And then, somehow, it got worse.

His first two games of a new season, with a new coach picked almost specifically for him, were nothing short of a disaster. His first pass of the season in New Orleans was picked off, and there was blood in the water, which brought out all the sharks. He looked shaken, showing no signs of the kind of swagger we saw in the season finale in Atlanta. The following week was no better, as he threw 26 passes for 84 yards, a 3.2 yards per attempt average that spoke volumes about the trust he had in himself. So, there was no option but to make a change. Dave Canales, a first-time head coach, had to make what could have been a career-defining decision two games into his career. He had a whole team to coach, and Young's play those first two weeks was holding them all back. Not Young himself, they still believed that the guy they voted a captain would, at some point, get back to himself. But it was clear the quarterback needed a minute.

General manager Dan Morgan acknowledged this week there was always an intention for Young to go back into the lineup, but it wasn't anything they were rushing, especially after Andy Dalton walked into Las Vegas and calmly had an offensive game a play-caller dreams of, easily moving the ball downfield, relying on the run game and play-action, shots all over the place. Dalton couldn't maintain that level, but there was no sign he wasn't maintaining the role until he sprained his thumb so badly in a car wreck that he couldn't pick up his phone, much less text anyone for several days.

So Young's next chance, which was going to be eventual, instead became immediate.

And immediately, he looked like a different guy.

The stats tell the story accurately and well.

In the first 20 games of his career, from his rookie season to those disastrous first two games and some mop-up duty as Dalton's backup, he completed 59.5 percent of his passes at a 5.4 yards per attempt clip, with 11 touchdowns and 13 interceptions, for a passer rating of 71.0.

In his most recent 10 games, he completed 61.8 percent of his passes, 6.6 yards per attempt, with 15 touchdowns and six interceptions, for a passer rating of 101.9.

And he was as outwardly different as his numbers. If he slouched his way out of the Superdome in September, he strutted his way out of Mercedes-Benz Stadium in January, with his no-look touchdown to Tommy Tremble the most obvious sign of how new this all was.

"That's what ballers do," Tremble said of Young's now-famous turning around and signaling for a touchdown before he had even caught the pass.

From the outside, it might have been a surprise. But the guys he's on the practice field every day never sensed a big change.

"You talk about taking a leap and just going through some stuff and just coming out the other side that much stronger," left tackle Ikem Ekwonu said. "Obviously really cool seeing the story that played out this year and just all the adversity he went through and just how much that he just killed it there at the end. Definitely excited looking forward to next year, and I've got to give a big shout out to Bryce and how he handled some of those things."

The "how he handled" part is instructive there, because there was little outward change in him in the daily work. Young was the best player on the roster throughout training camp, looking calm and authoritative. For the people who worked alongside him, there was always a belief, but Young had to validate it by playing the way he did in the second half of the season.

"The way he handled being benched, the way he handled just coming back out there, he just didn't miss a beat," veteran center Austin Corbett said.

The 29-year-old Corbett and the 23-year-old Young had a running joke this season in which the quarterback would say, "I'm not that much younger than you." But Corbett's a father of three who lives in the suburbs, and the Young's out here getting calls from Rod Wave and sitting courtside at Hornets games, so their lives and their contexts are very different. But Corbett can't help but admire the maturity Young displayed this year, or the sheer gall it took to throw that pass to Tremble and casually look away because of course it was a touchdown.

"His ability to handle that situation as he did and his ability to stand up here with you guys just constantly and all the other attention that he got, it just speaks volumes to who he is," Corbett said while surrounded by a group of reporters, a fraction of the attention Young was getting through his very public benching. "And we're finally just seeing him just play free when he does that, it's incredible."

Incredible, like that pass to Tremble.

"I didn't know somebody would even think about doing that in a game," Corbett said with a laugh. "Like, that's an absurd amount of confidence, and that's exactly who he is, though. He trusts his guys around him. He trusts that when he goes to make a play like on that other side, it's going to get caught, and something cool is going to happen. Man, it's fun to watch him."

That journey from being benched to being celebrated might have been a long one, but it was made by taking the same small step a lot of times. It wasn't complicated, in fact it was super simple. He just had to be exactly the same in the face of failure as success. The number of people who can pull that off is small.

"Just his ability just to self-reflect in that time of being benched," Corbett said. "He's making those plays at practice all the time and it's just a matter of taking those plays and making it happen on the game field. And for him to be able to go out and just finally like, you know what, like I had my time and I've got to trust my guys and I don't have to do this alone. And so for his ability to step up and just cut free and just trust his guys to go do it, it's awesome."

As often as he uses the word "super," Young also talks about the collective effort required for all of this to come to pass.

And when Canales talks about their growth together, the rookie head coach and the pedigreed quarterback growing together, he marveled at the way he and Young have gotten closer with every routine day.

"I love that story," Canales said with a grin. "I think that the natural progression of myself as the head coach, a second-year play caller, learning, growing, taking information in, being humble about the stuff like, I didn't like that call. And being able to take that information and hopefully that allows Bryce to see like, look, we're not looking for perfection here. We're looking for just growth and let's go forward together and let's find the solutions together.

"You know we want to be a solution-oriented team and so I've loved that we've kind of taken those steps together as an offense. As a quarterback, as play caller, head coach, and all that. And for sure you know some of the other guys on our staff as well who are doing things for the first time. So it's a cool story, and it is kind of the nature of what we're doing, and I'm excited for the progress and for where we're heading next."

But the next chapter won't be written until they all pause and reflect on this journey.

The distance from where Bryce Young was in New Orleans to where he was in Atlanta is greater than the 500 miles between those cities, and he knows that.

Because Bryce Young treats all of this the same, he sees this as one step in an even longer journey.

"I mean, I think this is a great opportunity," Young said of the season. "One, just being able to build. Us having this foundation, obviously compared to last year when you're going in and knowing you're restarting and things are different, it's a different approach. And this year knowing, you know who's here, you know what you're working towards, you have a lot better idea of what you have. You never know, obviously, what the offseason holds, and all that, but the foundation is there.

"So being able to carry that out is huge. And just being able to continue to build, us as a team, having flashes of what we're capable of. And now just the focus instead of finding it, on making it consistent, making it the standard. You know, I think it's a lot better place to be."

And knowing that going into an offseason leaves Young with a sense of calm gratitude. They're in a better place, he's in a better place. You might say they're all "super blessed."