INDIANAPOLIS — The Jets began the day 60 minutes from their first Super Bowl in 41 years. Then they found themselves 30 tantalizing minutes from the Promised Land, leading the Colts at halftime of yesterday’s AFC Championship game at Lucas Oil Stadium and feeling like this was their destiny.
“Thirty minutes … so close yet so far,” Jets veteran right tackle Damien Woody would say later.
At the end of the day, close is all the Jets got to booking a trip to south Florida for Super Bowl XLIV, because they couldn’t stave off Peyton Manning and the Colts, who stormed to a 30-17 victory to get to their second Super Bowl in four years.
After the Jets had built a 17-6 lead just before the first-half’s two-minute warning and seemingly had the Colts exactly where they wanted them, the Colts scored 24 unanswered points and crushed the Jets’ Super Bowl dream.
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“We felt like we had the team to get to the Super Bowl,” Jets safety Jim Leonhard said.
“We expected to go to the Super Bowl,” Woody said. “And to come so far . . . it was right there sitting in front of us and yet so far away. We were 30 minutes away.”
All week, the Jets had visions dancing in their heads of confetti showering down on them as their season ended. They got exactly that yesterday. The problem was that it came two weeks too early.
The confetti that streamed down onto the field yesterday was blue and white, celebrating not the Super Bowl victory the Jets dreamed about, but a Colts AFC Championship title.
So the Colts, now 16-2, will be representing the AFC in the Super Bowl on Feb. 7 against the Saints, 31-28 overtime winners over the Vikings last night.
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The Jets took a 17-13 lead into halftime and were frustrating Manning and the Colts, who settled for two second-quarter field goals after first-and-goal situations.
They were even making big plays on offense, with Sanchez (17-of-30, 257 yards, 2 TDs, 1 INT), bidding to become the first rookie quarterback in NFL history to lead his team to a Super Bowl, connecting with Braylon Edwards on an electric 80-yard TD pass in the first quarter and throwing another TD to Dustin Keller.
The end result, however, turned out to be too much like the often-tortured history of this franchise — a terrible tease.
The Colts turned that 17-13 deficit into 17 consecutive second-half points on a Jets defense that hadn’t allowed more than 15 points in a game in their last four games, all wins.
AUDIO
REX RYAN: “WE MADE SOME MISTAKES”
MARK SANCHEZ: “BACK NEXT YEAR”
BRAYLON EDWARDS: “WE GOT COMFORTABLE”
JIM LEONHARD: “NOT LOSING CONFIDENCE”
PEYTON MANNING: “WE WERE AGGRESSIVE”
The killer moment in the game came at the end of the second half, when, after the Jets took the 17-6 lead with 2:11 remaining on a Jay Feely 48-yard field goal, they allowed Manning, a two-minute-drill magician, to march the Colts 80 yards in 58 seconds and cut the lead to 17-13 at the half with a 16-yard scoring pass to Austin Collie.
Several Jets players, including Leonhard and Edwards, hinted that the Jets were rattled by the Colts’ late score at the end of the first half and that they didn’t react well to it in the second half.
“We didn’t come out in the second half with that same attitude and that same fire,” Edwards said. “We got a little complacent, and the Indianapolis Colts, they exposed that, especially Peyton Manning.”
Rex Ryan said that late score in the first half “took a lot of wind out of our sails.”
“To give up an easy score like that after we’d played so well was disheartening,” Leonhard said.
Leonhard said he felt a sense of frustration in the locker room at halftime, with “people getting (ticked) off.”
“But we needed to understand we were 30 minutes away from the Super Bowl; we had the lead at halftime,” Leonhard said, exasperated.
After Feely missed a 52-yard field goal as the Jets’ first drive of the second half stalled, Manning gave the Colts a 20-17 lead when he connected with Pierre Garcon on a 4-yard TD pass with 8:03 remaining in the third quarter. And the Jets became a speck in the Colts’ rearview mirror from there.
Manning, who was 8-for-14 with no touchdowns before the two-minute drive to end the first half, finishing 26-for-39 for 377 yards and three touchdowns.
The Colts put the game away with a 15-yard Manning scoring pass to tight end Dallas Clark for a 27-17 lead with 8:52 remaining in the game and a 21-yard Stover field goal with 2:29 remaining.
“This will eat us up all offseason,” Leonhard said. “When you come up short there are a lot of thoughts that go through your head. You could see all across this locker room, guys are like, ‘Where do we go from here? What do we do now?’
“We feel like we’re ready to take that next step. We felt like we were ready this year. Maybe we weren’t. But we’ll prepare next season to take that next step.”