It wasn’t just that the Jets were about to play for the AFC Championship Game; despite their star-crossed history, the Jets had played in three such games in the previous 31 years.
It wasn’t just the possibility of playing in the Super Bowl; the Jets, after all, are one of just 18 teams who have won a Lombardi Trophy in their corporate trophy case. Ask any of the 14 teams whose shelves are barren about the cruel burdens of history.
No: The last time the Jets visited Pittsburgh, the stakes at play were much higher than any of that. Even when they won Super Bowl III, they’d never been bigger, more of a national story, more of a buzz-maker. They were coming off wins over Peyton Manning’s Colts and Tom Brady’s Patriots. This was an opportunity to seize so much: a championship, their city, the destiny about which Rex Ryan had spoken incessantly ….
“And Pittsburgh,” Jerricho Cotchery said yesterday, “came out with so much more energy than we did.”
Cotchery laughed a rueful laugh on the other end of a scratchy telephone line. He is a Steeler now. He said his new teammates for two years have given him “a lot of grief” for what happened in Cotchery’s final game as a Jet, when the Steelers raced to a 24-0 lead, when the Jets answered with 19 straight points, when time finally ran out on the Jets.
“Painful,” is how Ryan described it.
In many ways, this is the perfect time for the Jets to revisit Heinz Field, the graveyard where their best team since 1968 saw its season go to die. The Jets have been yearning to reach the heights they occupied up until the early evening of Jan. 23, 2011, ever since they limped off the field that day. They firmly believed they were going to the Super Bowl that day. Even their fans, never the most over-confident lot, had started to buy in.
“It was a good playoff and a good week of practice, I remember that,” Mark Sanchez said. “And a disappointing result.”
So now, after a humbling 2011 season, after an offseason that brought so much rancor and rabble-rousing … and after an opening game against Buffalo that can best be described in one word — wow — the Jets revisit Pittsburgh, revisit Heinz Field, walking into a hornet’s nest against a proud team that took one on the chin in Denver Sunday night on national TV, and they take a splendid opportunity with them.
They can’t qualify for a Super Bowl on Sunday; that ship sailed 20 months ago and is never coming back to the banks of the Monongahela River. But they can take a large stride toward reclaiming the promise they wore as a vest on those heady winter days of 2011. They can back up their bludgeoning of the Bills, serve notice that reports of their demise really were greatly exaggerated.
There was a time when you would have urged the Jets not to even bother boarding an airplane to Pittsburgh but remember: A month before that title-game deflation, the Jets walked into Heinz and all but clinched a playoff spot by keeping Ben Roethlisberger out of the end zone on the game’s final play and winning in western Pennsylvania for the first time in their history.
That game was one reason they believed they were destined to treat Pittsburgh as a mere stopover between Newark and Dallas-Fort Worth 20 months ago.
This game can have a similar impact. For one thing, as the new has worn off that 48-28 win over the Bills, the nagging question — fairly — has been this: Was that more about the Jets on the left side of the hyphen, or the Bills on the right? And this: A lot of teams have looked good starting seasons 1-0; what happens when the glow dims?
“We have to be sharper, faster, better,” Sanchez said. “We realize that. And we recognize that playing this team at that stadium is a good way for us to test exactly where we are.”
And also to see if they have it in them to get back to where they were.
michael.vaccaro@nypost.com