In 1995, Sam Mills wrote a new chapter here

He had experience, and also an added chip on his shoulder.

Going into the 1995 offseason, Mills was more than a little insulted that the Saints hadn’t made more of an effort to keep him out of free agency.

In the NFL, the conventional wisdom is to say goodbye a year early rather than a year late, and there was some hesitance on their part to commit to a guy who was about to turn 36 with a lot of hard miles on his tires. He missed seven games in 1993 after surgery to repair a knee injury, but had played every game the following year. He also made four Pro Bowls as the leader of the Dome Patrol defense, which put the Saints on the football map. It didn’t help that one of his patrons there, longtime Saints GM Jim Finks, had died the year before, so there was one fewer voice in his corner.

“When we started talking to the Saints, their initial reaction was, ‘Why don’t you go see what the market is for you?'” Senior said. “Sam was like, ‘Wow, they’re not even going to offer me a contract?’

“But when I started talking to Bill (Polian), he showed that there was a lot of passion for Sam to be there in Charlotte. And that was important to him.”

There was still the matter of negotiating a deal, and that was never simple with Polian. Senior laughed and recalled a previous set of contract talks about another player (former Bills linebacker Shane Conlan) that got a little combative.

“I thought Bill was going to physically throw me out the door negotiating that one,” Senior recalled with a laugh.

The Panthers were busy doing other business trying to stock an entire roster, though free agency didn’t move at the same speed-of-internet pace it does today. After the expansion draft in December 1994 (when they picked up contributors Willie Green and Mathew Campbell), the Panthers picked through the scraps of the expansion draft in February, collecting odd parts and castoffs, and a few guys who never made it here (including quarterback Doug Pederson, who went on to win a Super Bowl with…