You can already tell that most every game the Jets play will look like this, feel like this, a million nails being bitten to the quick, thousands of voices scraping the sky, the defense sent on to the field again and again, asked to make just one final stand … and then maybe one more after that.
And another after that.
And another after that …
“That’s when you want to be out there on the field, with the game on the line, with everything in the air,” David Harris said. “That’s when it’s most fun, man.”
Maybe half an hour earlier, Harris was crashing unimpeded around the edge of the Tennessee Titans defense, and his eyes saw the most wonderful things a linebacker’s eyes can see: nothing but green plastic grass sitting between him and Kerry Collins.
“I came scot-free,” Harris said, almost apologetically.
Inside the Meadowlands, nobody was asking for an asterisk, nobody was looking for bashful modesty. The moment Harris clobbered Collins for an eight-yard loss was the moment the 75,863 soggy spectators understood that the Jets were going to rise to 3-0 on the season (at a point of the schedule when most of them would’ve signed up for 1-2), that there was no way Collins was going to weasel his way out of third-and-23, inside two minutes, no timeouts, down a TD.
“This,” said Rex Ryan, the effusive coach with the infectious plan, “was a total team effort, the way they always are.”
It was the right thing to say after a feel-good 24-17 victory. It is the kind of thing that explains why Ryan’s players seem prepared to do just about anything he asks them to do.
It is also not exactly correct. The Titans did their share to help, fumbling away a kickoff and a punt that, combined, led to two Jets touchdowns.
The Jets offense went into hibernation for the better part of three quarters, and the kid, Mark Sanchez, even took the first boo bath of his career.
And in the end, it felt like the entire fourth quarter paired the Titans offense and the Jets defense, and that is a match-up the Meadowlands felt awfully comfortable with.
The Titans had five possessions in the fourth quarter — an absurd amount in a close game, when the Jets were trying (mostly failing) to bleed the clock whenever they had the ball. And this is what those possessions looked like:
1) A three-and-out, for a total of minus-one yard.
2) One long Chris Johnson run followed by three smothering plays yielding two more yards.
3) Another three-and-out, picking up precisely zero yards.
4) A promising venture into Jets territory that ended when Harris, dropping deep into his spot in the Cover-3, picked off Collins.
5) And the final gasp, which Harris extinguished with his first sack of the day.
“We never wanted [the Titans] to get too comfortable back there,” Ryan said. “I knew they were going in expecting all kinds of pressure, and that’s why I tried to play a lot of coverage early. Then when [Collins] got too comfortable back there, we had to heat him up again.”
Ryan’s vision is helped by an ensemble defense that seems, week by week, to serve as a star-making stage for both Harris and Bart Scott, the Penn & Teller linebackers, one of them (Harris) quiet and fierce and the other chatty and brash.
It was Scott who led the Jets with nine tackles and took great glee in thanking Titans fullback Ahmad Hall for ripping a page out of the Jets’ playbook and chirping like a champion last week.
“For those who thought we couldn’t play smash-mouth?” Scott asked. “How dare you.”
Actually, it was Scott who dared Harris when he first arrived from Baltimore to team with him to be the most dynamic 1-2 linebacking duo in the sport. Ryan, for one, believes they already are there. And after hearing a lot of talk about Harris being trade bait for Brandon Marshall in the preseason, Ryan offered a laugh and a guarantee.
“That’s one guy I promise is not going to be in any trade,” Ryan said.
Right now, the folks who fill the Meadowlands with hosannas for their defense wouldn’t part with any of them. Least of all Penn & Teller.
michael.vaccaro @nypost.com