THE Jets weren’t just beaten, they were dead. It wasn’t just the game about to be tossed in the wood chipper, it was the season. The Bills were one first down away from emptying the pews at Giants Stadium. The clock was melting away, the crowd was apoplectic.
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This is what despair looks like, and sounds like, and feels like.
And then the football was on the ground.
“Pick it up!” Shaun Ellis yelled, and his line mate, Bryan Thomas, tried to do just that but the ball always bounces funniest when it’s near your fingers and it slipped through like mercury, and now the remainder of the 78,548 people picked up Ellis’ cry, turning it into a plea: “Pick it up! Pick it up! Pick it up!”
And before he knew it, really, before he could process what was happening with his eyes and with his brain, Ellis followed his own advice. He reached for it once, reached for it twice, and suddenly it was in his grasp, and he was still on his feet, 11 yards separating him and a Miracle of the Meadowlands sequel, 30 years later. And now he could hear his brain offering a separate piece of advice:
“Don’t fumble.”
He didn’t fumble. He tip-toed with as much grace as a 6-foot-5, 285-pound man can, he dipped one of those toes in the end zone, he sent the Meadowlands into a frothy frenzy, he turned a certain 27-24 season-deflating loss into the most improbable 31-27 season-saving win you will ever see.
“All I could say as I was watching,” Brett Favre would later recall, “was ‘Wow!’ ”
You heard that a lot all over the Meadowlands, even as the Jets’ defense finished out the final 114 seconds of the game playing catch with Bills quarterback J.P. Losman, even as the few Buffalo backers in the crowd opted for larger words than “wow,” most of them at least four letters long.
“All I was thinking,” said Abram Elam, the safety who’d caused the fumble in the first place, “was, ‘Are you kidding?’ ” It was a fair question. The Jets had done everything in their power to make the Bills feel safe and comfy at the Meadowlands, had done everything but order them room service, had allowed a team with nothing to play for to push them around and, now, push them away.
The Jets were about to burn all their timeouts, and it was so much fool’s gold because every time Marshawn Lynch touched the ball, it seemed, he picked up seven yards. It was second-and-5. One more first down, 5 more yards, and the Jets would be a third-place team in the AFC East, forced to make a two-week perp walk to play out the string.
“All week long, all we tell each other in practice is: Who’s gonna make a play?” Elam said.
Six weeks earlier, at Buffalo, it was Elam who’d burned the Bills for a pick-six interception that turned a game upside-down. Now, he was readying for a blitz, knowing that in the Bills’ late-game package – the NFL term is “Gotta-Have-It” plays – the Bills were likely to run Lynch to the right side of the Jets’ defense. It was Elam’s job to collide with Lynch.
But Lynch was nowhere to be seen. Because for some reason, Bills coach Dick Jauron decided to take the ball out of Lynch’s hands and put it in the paws of Losman, who may well be the worst quarterback in the NFL. Now, instead of trying to stick a run, Elam was trying to catch a wobbly quarterback rolling out to the left side of the defense.
He caught him. He swiped at the ball, missed.
“Then I swiped again,” he said, “and suddenly you could hear the crowd explode.”
Suddenly the ball was on the ground, and in Ellis’ hands, and Ellis – who’d spent much of the last two weeks dealing with his marijuana arrest, who is fortunate the Jets hadn’t banished him for it – was in the end zone. And suddenly it was the Jets who were feeling awfully fortunate.
“We’ll take it,” Favre said, and since the Bills were intoxicated by the spirit of the season, it was right there for them to do just that. They live another week.