INDIANAPOLIS – The clock had hit zero and midnight at the same time, ending both a season and one of the most magical carpet rides you’ll ever see. Inside Lucas Oil Stadium, there were 67,650 Hoosiers howling at the roof and there were millions of pieces of blue-and-white confetti floating in the air.
Quietly, the visitors filed off the field, the longest journey in sports, the one that begins with turning your back on someone else’s party. The Jets had already seen enough of the Colts across 60 minutes of this humbling 30-17 loss; they didn’t need to see any more. A handful of Jets fans extended their hands, and tried to scream over the din.
Just outside the tunnel, Rob Ryan, brother of the Jets coach, spotted Braylon Edwards. The two of them had worked together briefly in Cleveland this season, and Ryan gave Edwards a warm embrace. Edwards hugged him back.
“We’ll be back next year,” he said.
That’s what they believe, and that’s what you’ll want to believe, and maybe they will. Maybe next year they will take care of business before the saloonkeeper screams for last call, they’ll win a few more games, maybe even get this championship game in that brand new stadium in the Jersey swamplands. Maybe this was just a baby step toward glory.
But this is the feeling that was hard to shake just before 6:30 on the Sunday night when the self-professed toughest out of the playoffs was finally handed a pink slip:
It was there for them now.
All of it: the Super Bowl, the parade, the opportunity to write an improbable finish to an impossible tale. All there for the taking. It was 17-6, Jets, after two schoolyard plays out of the back of Brian Schottenheimer’s imagination and one turnover caused by one more fierce hit from a proud defense. Everyone knew the Colts weren’t likely to end the game stuck on “6.”
But it was the Jets who wound up stuck on their side of the hyphen, the Jets who never again reached the scoreboard. If you want, this can be the day when you beat your chest proudly as a Jets fan and talk with wonder of this gift they delivered you the past four weeks, and of all the bright days that lay ahead. You’re entitled to that.
Or you can look at it the way safety Jim Leonhard looked at it.
“Nothing is guaranteed you in this business,” said the feistiest Jet, on a day when he collected another big play, recovering a Joseph Addai fumble that became the Jets’ final three points of the day. “Maybe we’ll be back. But you never know. We expected to play well. We needed to play better. And now we need to take how we feel right now into next season. But that’s next season. Even with most of the same players, it’ll be a whole new team.”
He shook his head.
“We thought this team was good enough,” he said.
For 27 minutes, it was. For 27 minutes the Jets got after Peyton Manning, they tortured the Indianapolis defense, they allowed the kid quarterback, Mark Sanchez, to spread his wings ever so slightly and forged that 17-6 lead. They turned Lucas Oil Stadium into a morgue save for the pockets of grandstand where you could hear Jets fans chanting.
Then – bing, bang, bam, boom – Manning drove the Colts to a touchdown in four plays, 80 yards and 58 seconds just before the half, and you could sense that someone had taken a Zippo lighter to the Jets’ happy ending. Jay Feely missed a couple of makeable kicks. Shonn Greene smashed a rib. Manning drove the Colts down the field, took the lead, and even destiny’s fiercest devotees knew they weren’t going to give it back.
“We dispelled the myth this year,” Woody Johnson said, forcing a smile, and maybe they did that, and maybe that’s all you can ask out of the season just completed. Maybe that would’ve been enough on another day.
Just not on a day when they were close enough smell the sea breezes of South Beach. And simply couldn’t close the deal.