Marina-native Ron Rivera heads to Super Bowl 50.

Way back in 2007, Marina native and Seaside High grad Ron Rivera sat in his office in San Diego, where he was a defensive coordinator for the Chargers, and admitted he was disappointed.

“My goal and hope is always be at the top, at the peak, the pinnacle,” he said. “In my profession, that’s a head coach who won a Super Bowl.”

At that point, after he had masterminded a top NFL defense in Chicago and interviewed for a number of head coaching gigs, he received zero offers. He wasn’t invited back to the Windy City.

So he took a demotion to linebacker coach in San Diego and wasn’t exactly feeling like he summited Everest. But he didn’t linger there for a second.

“You learn from everything that you go through,” he continued. “Yes, sure we have some disappointments but they are only as big as you let them be. I’ve always tried to keep going forward and wait for the next opportunity.”

Eight years later, he’s hours away from that pinnacle, Super Bowl 50 against the Peyton Manning-led Denver Broncos. Rivera directs a Carolina Panthers team which averaged an NFL-best 31.3 points per game and a ballhawking defense that boasts two of the best linebackers anywhere (Luke Kuechly and Thomas Davis), the kind that make a former Seaside High and Cal linebacker proud, and set the NFC championship game record for takeaways.

Rivera, who was born on Fort Ord, had to overcome plenty in between then and now. After the 2012 season, the Panthers’ third straight losing campaign, NFL Network was among the media reporting Rivera was fired. Last year his family’s house burned to the ground thanks to a faulty fireplace, the same week they dropped a playoff game to Seattle. Then he lost brother and close friend Mickey to pancreatic cancer.

His resilience doesn’t happen without an upbringing Rivera credits for his discipline. “It’s a way of life,” Ron, now 54, told the Weekly. “I grew up in the military. My dad was always giving me and my three brothers tasks to do. You’re always working.” Or playing sports: basketball, baseball, ping pong, football.

“We kept them busy,” Dolores Rivera told the Weekly in ’07. “They went from one sport into another. With that and school there wasn’t much else they could get into. With four boys we had to.”

As the backstories proliferate along the media-soaked runway to the biggest stage in U.S. sports, some of the best Rivera stories happened at Seaside High.

Then-head coach Carl Stephenson remembers an unconventional technique to force Rivera to direct the game.

“Sometimes he wouldn’t want to call the plays,” Stephenson told the Weekly as part of a cover story on Rivera’s rise, “but he was so good at it that I’d turn my back on the sidelines so he’d have to.

“One linebackers coach told me, ‘I don’t need to coach them. Ron taught them already.’”

Another story has surfaced ahead of the big game: In the wake of Rivera’s worst stretch in Charlotte, when many – at least outside the locker room – figured he’d be long gone, his owner asked him to meet with another coach with local ties, part-time Carmel resident, NFL Hall of Famer and Oakland Raiders legend John Madden.

Madden gave him two primary pieces of counsel that stand out among Rivera’s massive mound of coaching notes: Don’t think there’s some golden manual to coaching. Be yourself.

He promptly moved his office next to the locker room, getting literally and figuratively closer to his players. He skipped conventional wisdom and started taking more chances, earning the nickname Riverboat Ron, and empowering a team that plays with as much verve as any in NFL history. The Panthers polarize fans with exuberant celebrations, TV ads like Newton’s “Too bad they don’t make Band-Aids for feelings” (for Beats by Dre), and team “dab” dance photos after wins.

Rivera just asks that they stay true. In fact, that’s what he told the team after its lone loss: “We need to be ourselves, play our kind of football, no regrets.”

He returned to the theme the day after their record 49-15 NFC Championship win over the Arizona Cardinals: “Some of my experiences in coaching, you get to situations like the playoffs and sometimes you get a little bit of self doubt: ‘Should I change this?’

“We’re going to stick to what got us to where we are. We’ll [make] sure we keep our personality.”

Personality, not overconfidence. Like he said back in San Diego, “The players have to understand as soon as you feel like you’re there, you’re not even close.”

In other words: the pinnacle approaches, but don’t take anything for granted. If the Panthers execute that dictum, he doesn’t have to worry about being disappointed.

SUPER BOWL 50 happens 3:30pm Sunday, Feb. 7, on CBS.