ATLANTA — It is the most glorious sound a road team can hear, and Nick Folk didn’t bother to wait for it. The moment the football cleared the line of scrimmage — hell, the instant it came off his foot — Folk knew he had just won the game for the Jets, had put the finishing touches on a scintillating 30-28 upset of the Falcons.
The sound was coming — the sound of silence, the silence of 70,246 dirty birds brought to their knees by what now, officially, must be considered one of the best surprises of the season after five weeks. Folk punched the air with both fists before it could register with the crowd, before the clock even stuck 0:00.
“Best feeling on earth,” the Jets’ kicker said. “You’ve won the game and you want to celebrate winning the game as soon as possible.”
You know the feeling, right? Maybe you had a pillow over one eye as the ball was snapped late Monday night, and maybe you closed your eyes, waiting to hear the roar flatline, same as you probably watched a fourth quarter out of so many hellacious Jets yesterdays, the Falcons coming back from 27-14 down, going up 28-27, unleashing those old goblins that pay permanent rent on your soul as a Jets fan.
And then, this. And then, a victory that nudges them to 3-2 in a week when every other member of the AFC East lost. And then, this season, thought by so many to be lost before it started, to be over before it began, to be hopeless beyond the point of salvation.
“Maybe outside this room,” Muhammad Wilkerson said. “But not in here.”
Wilkerson is one of the reasons the Jets could stubbornly retain hope when the consensus was heading the other way. The Jets bid farewell to a franchise defensive player last spring, allowing cornerback Darrelle Revis to seek exile in Tampa; it has taken exactly five weeks to target Revis’ replacement as the face of the Jets defense.
If he isn’t there already.
“He’s borderline unstoppable,” Calvin Pace said.
And when he is, when he’s making the kind of game-changing play he made last night, strip-sacking Matt Ryan and turning the energy at Georgia Dome completely upside down … well, suddenly the season doesn’t look like a zombie trek to nowhere, does it?
Especially since the Jets have now twice found ways to win games that their historical DNA says they should have had no business winning. Week 1 against Tampa was one thing, a fortunate penalty allowing Folk to rescue them at the gun. This was something else, something different, something better.
This was a loud dome and a desperate foe that came so achingly close to the Super Bowl last year, and this was a 13-point lead that became a one-point deficit thanks to the requisite number of harrowing plays and referee whistles.
And then became a two-point victory because the rookie quarterback, Geno Smith, took a dozen giant leaps forward, because receivers who couldn’t catch a cold against the Patriots three weeks ago suddenly had Krazy Glue on their fingers, and because Folk knew he’d get the call, and would answer that call, it just depended on if it was “short, medium or long. I was ready either way.”
They all were.
“I’m glad we won this way,” said coach Rex Ryan, who with every positive steps seems to regather a little more of his old confidence, a little more of his old swagger. “It took every one of us, and we were fearless.”
There were only six penalties. There were zero turnovers. There was Wilkerson’s big play, and there was a blocked punt, and there were a couple of near-misses that showed how much in lock step the Jets were on both sides of the ball.
“Fearless,” Ryan said, “and not reckless.”
Suddenly a New York football season that seemed destined for a garbage bin has hope, and it’s the unlikely half of the partnership providing it, the green half, the team that was supposed to be an antidote for other cities across 16 games and 17 weeks.
“Everyone thought we were the team that Atlanta was going to get right on, turn their season around,” offensive lineman Willie Colon said. “We just told ourselves, ‘We don’t have to be that team.’ ”
No. They get something else, something better. They’ve gotten themselves a football season, a real one, and they’ve earned their way there. They kicked the plug out of the Georgia Dome wall, silenced the song of the south. And suddenly that feels like it can be just the beginning.