The season was about to be saved, and if you’ve never heard the sound of a football stadium simultaneously release sighs of relief and cries of approval, you should have been there at Giants Stadium last night, should have listened to the 78,774 people rise and roar as cornerback Terrell Thomas plucked Philip Rivers’ dying quail of a pass out of the sky.
The season was about to be saved. Thomas had stepped in front of Malcom Floyd and then raced toward the San Diego end zone. For a second, it seemed he might get there before he was snuffed to the ground by Jacob Hester and Marcus McNeill. No matter. It was first and goal at the Chargers’ 4. The Giants led by three points, and there were three minutes and 14 seconds left in the game; in a few moments they’d be up 10.
And a few more moments after that, the season would be saved.
“You’d have to say,” guard Chris Snee said later, “we were set up right there. We were a few yards from putting the game away.”
If this were a DVD, maybe you could have pushed “Pause” then, walked away, had dinner, washed your car, maybe turned it off for good. No need to see the details, right? You know how the movie is supposed to end.
But there was no remote control available at Giants Stadium.
PHOTOS: GIANTS LOSE TO CHARGERS
Nothing to stop what happened next: Brandon Jacobs barreling his way for 3 more yards, right up to the shadow of the goal, the same 78,774 people back on their feet, the same noise rising out of the Stadium, spilling over the side, into the parking lots, onto the Turnpike . . .
And then, a hush.
“I didn’t execute my block,” Snee explained. “And when that happens, often as not, you know what comes next.”
A yellow flag comes next. Holding. Ten yards. Instead of first-and-goal from the 4, it’s first-and-goal from the 14. Instead of putting the game away, the game was still very much in doubt, especially once Snee’s father-in-law approved the three plays that followed: short pass over the middle, run into the line and another run into the line.
“You can second-guess that all you want,” Snee’s father-in-law, Tom Coughlin, said later, already understanding that no matter whether he gave the invitation or not, the second-guessing had already begun of the man who coaches the Giants.
So it ought to be an interesting couple of weeks around the dinner table if the Coughlins and the Snees happen to break bread, the son-in-law making — his words — “the mistake that cost us the game” and the father in law — my words — reaching back to a far more conservative place in his career, opting to coach not to lose rather than coaching to win.
“You don’t want a turnover there,” Coughlin explained, all but revealing how little he really trusts Eli Manning at this point of this season.
What the Giants got, instead, was an unsatisfying consolation prize, a field goal that nudged the lead from three to six, leaving the Chargers 127 seconds to try to march 80 yards for a winning score.
“Plenty of time,” Coughlin admitted. “I’ll give you that.”
More than enough, actually; Rivers needed only 106 ticks to get the Chargers home, capped by one 21-yard catch-and-run to Darren Sproles and one 18-yard toss to Vincent Jackson. If you’ve never heard a stadium mimic the sound of collapse, of despair, of disgust, then you should’ve heard Giants Stadium then. It was a morgue. In more ways than one.
“Close,” receiver Domenik Hixon said, “doesn’t cut it.”
The Giants had plenty of chances throughout the game to make what happened at the end perfectly meaningless, of course. There was a botched field goal early. There were so many promising drives that died inexplicably during the course of the game. It didn’t have to come down to one holding penalty and one game plan clutched too close to the vest in the final breaths of the game.
Maybe a few weeks ago, when the Giants still believed themselves bulletproof, these things would have taken care of themselves. Not now. Not anymore. And you wonder, all at once, if anything can really save the season anymore.