FOXBOROUGH — Some of them tried to stay true to the script, to the merry talking points they were advised to offer. But after a while it was useless, and fruitless. They didn’t believe they should be lauded for coming close. They didn’t think they should lament the breaks of the game.
All you had to do was look at Calvin Pace’s face, landscaped with frustration. All you had to do was look at Antonio Cromartie’s shoulders, still twitching, still unable to let go of the game. All you had to do was look at the anger sculpting Stephen Hill’s posture, and Bryan Thomas’, and Yeremiah Bell’s.
All you had to do was listen to Dustin Keller:
“A loss is a loss,” he said. “I’m not digging moral victories.”
If that’s true, if that’s what most of the 53 people inside the Jets locker room take away from this galling, appalling near-miss, this 29-26 loss to the detested Patriots, then maybe this will be a game we remember in December, maybe even January. Bill Parcells once famously declared that in the NFL you get no medals for trying, and from the look of the Jets, and the sound of them, they didn’t want any.
“If there’s one thing I want us to remember,” Cromartie said, “it’s how close we were to taking over control of this division. Forget the game. Forget what people have said about us. That’s what I want to focus on. And how to get it back.”
There is always a sense that the Patriots are sitting on the verge, poised to run and hide atop the AFC East, even if week after week they look a lot more average than we’re used to seeing them. So this was the Jets’ shot to declare a new order to the division, to stake their claim, to assume a perch all by themselves in first place, critics and skeptics be damned.
They were down 10 in the fourth quarter, then up three in the fourth quarter. They had a wonderful game defensively for 58 1/2 minutes, then bent just enough to allow the Patriots to tie them, and then sneak ahead of then. And Mark Sanchez, so beleaguered and belabored, was mostly terrific, passing for 328 yards with a completion percentage (68.3) higher than Tom Brady’s (61.9) … until the end, when he was flat on his back, free of the football, a crowd of 68,752 rejoicing for the team they had nearly booed off the field.
“We weren’t good enough when we had to be,” Pace said.
“We couldn’t finish it,” Rex Ryan said.
A win could have done so much for this team, and they knew it. Beat a 10 1/2-point favorite, a team that has enjoyed stepping on their necks so often, that shakes its head every time the Jets declare themselves true contenders in the East, and the impact would have been immeasurable. Instead, the Jets are 3-4, and it’s hard to look at a game they have won they weren’t supposed to win, or a game they have lost they weren’t supposed to lose.
They are chalk from where you probably picked the games in July.
But they need to be better than chalk, because 3-4 means they have forfeited almost all of their margin of error. It’s true that 9-7 may be enough to make the playoffs out of the AFC, and that 10-6 might be enough to steal the East, but that still means the Jets are looking at having to start a hell of a parlay. And soon.
Maybe, if who they really are is the team that stood 97 seconds away from stunning the Patriots, then they can beat the Dolphins on the front end of their bye next week, win at Seattle and at St. Louis on the back. Maybe. But the NFL is littered with teams that specialize in “maybe.”
Finish a game like the one the Jets had in their palms yesterday, you get to talk about something else. The view from first place, for starters.
“We could’ve set ourselves up so well,” Keller said. “But we have to move on. We can’t let one loss become two.”
No medals for trying, no bonuses for almost. No digging moral victories.
The Jets can still have the season they crave. But they need to be snappy about it.