DENVER — He discarded his jacket, an optimist’s play, a few seconds before the ball was snapped. Maybe in a different time — a different decade — that would’ve been enough to scare the ball wide, to make a gust of wind appear out of the darkness. There was a time we believed Peyton Manning could do anything on a football field, after all.
There was a time.
Just not this time. Not now. Soon enough the ball was snapped, the ball was placed, the ball was kicked, and in that moment the kicker for the Baltimore Ravens, Justin Tucker, was wrapping his arms around his holder, Sam Koch. A kicker knows when he’s hit one stiff every bit as much as a golfer does.
And on the home team sideline, Manning looked at the ball clear the uprights, looked at the scoreboard — frozen forever at Ravens 38, Broncos 35 — and shook his head. It had been a wonderful season. Suddenly, in was all in the past tense.
“It stings,” Manning said.
It hurt worse because at the end of the day, the end of the game, he had shoved his team’s feet to the abyss with one awful throw, one terrible decision.
Manning to Mannchez, just like that.
“We did some good things,” he would say, “but right now it’s hard to think about anything but the loss tonight.”
He wasn’t alone — he will spend the offseason sharing the miseries with the members of the Broncos secondary, burned time and again yesterday by Joe Flacco and his receivers. Impossibly, Baltimore had scored a game-tying TD with just 31 seconds left in the fourth quarter, a 70-yard strike to Jacoby Jones, a fitting sequel, 40-plus years later, to the Immaculate Reception.
But Manning had two chances in OT to make the ending right. He couldn’t do much on the first series, then tried to do too much on the second, scampering out of the pocket, trying to force a ball to his old Indianapolis wing man Brandon Stokley. Against the grain, with limited arm strength to begin with, it never had a prayer. It was a drop-dead imitation of the throw Brett Favre made that doomed the Vikings against the Saints a couple of years ago.
Not exactly the comp he was looking for on a day when his playoff record sank to 9-11, when he would lose a playoff opener for the eighth time, a record that belies both his pedigree and his talent.
“Bad throw,” he said. “The decision wasn’t great, either. I thought I had an opening, and I didn’t get enough on it, and I was trying to make a play … and it’s a throw I’d certainly like to have back.”
And when Corey Graham plucked it out of the sky — his second pick of the day — suddenly it began to dawn on the crowd of 76,603 inside Sports Authority Field at Mile High: This storybook that had taken them all on an 11-week gallop from 2-3 to the No. 1 seed in the AFC? Someone was lighting it on fire.
The unlikeliest culprit, too.
So much of what Manning is now was on full display yesterday — the good, the bad, the uncomfortable. His numbers weren’t terrible — 28-for-43, 290 yards, three touchdowns, a QB rating of 88.3 — but the integers didn’t say as much as the eyes did. There is so little zip on his ball anymore; so much of his success is based on touch and timing.
You get the sense that spooks his coaches, too, and himself. He audibled to a running play on third-and-7, when a 7 1/2-yard pass would’ve clinched the game. And after Flacco’s heroic toss to Jones, the Broncos got the ball back on their own 20-yard line, 31 seconds and two time outs left, needing 50 yards for a legit field goal. Are you kidding? Peyton Manning could get you 50 yards in 31 seconds with both eyes closed when he was in Indianapolis, at the peak of his power.
This time, he took a knee.
“If you don’t win,” Denver coach John Fox said, “you get criticized on everything.”
They didn’t win. It wasn’t all on the quarterback, because these losses never are. But season’s the last image — a hapless throw from a quarterback who knows better — will stay with all of them a while. The quarterback most of all.
michael.vaccaro@nypost.com