BALTIMORE — On a night when the Jets asked Mark Sanchez to be the Sanchise, he showed up as the Can’tchise.
He was supposed to be beyond nightmare games like this, games where he gives his team absolutely no chance to win, games where he gift-wraps a blood-thirsty defense 24 points.
A visor may have protected his broken nose but it couldn’t protect him and his team from leaving M&T Bank Stadium with a broken spirit.
It wasn’t until a quarter to one when Sanchez, a 34-17 loser, dragged his bruised and battered body into the interview room
“We all share in this loss, I believe,” he said.
The disoriented offensive line is to blame for failing to protect him.
But he is to blame for failing to protect the football.
Rex Ryan needed him to stare into Ray Lewis’ manic linebacker eyes and refuse to blink, to avoid the bonehead mistakes that Ed Reed and any of his ravenous friends more often than not return for touchdowns, to silence the deafening crowd and be the Road Warrior quarterback, to be the admiral who steadies The Good Ship Rex and keeps it from morphing into the football Titanic before the seas get real angry this Sunday around Foxborough.
He blinked.
He is the jittery admiral of what alarmingly looks like the football Titanic.
Joe Namath will be livid, I guarantee ya. And has every right to be.
Sanchez had dug the Jets into a 27-7 hole that had suddenly become a 27-17 deficit, thanks to a 35-yard pick six by David Harris. Sanchez had coughed up 17 of those points on his own. He still had 30 minutes to atone for a first half that conjured up painful memories of his skittish rookie season.
And then here came another.
Aaron Maybin, with a relentless motor, grabbed Flacco’s right arm and forced a fumble with his first career sack that Marcus Dixon recovered.
So Sanchez stood 27 yards from bringing the Jets to within 27-24.
In a matter of seconds, he was trudging off the field down 34-17.
He had taken a savage beating in the first half, from angry Raven defenders abusing an overmatched Jets offensive line that was a sieve without Nick Mangold.
Now Terrell Suggs came barreling in on the panic-stricken Sanchez, who frantically lobbed a pitch toward the right sidelines that A.J. Burnett would have wanted back, a pitch that didn’t have enough mustard on it to get to Santonio Holmes, a pitch that Lardarius Webb picked off and returned 73 yards for the killer touchdown.
“That just can’t happen,” Sanchez said. “That ended up kinda being the straw that broke the camel’s back.”
Holmes agreed. “He threw it late,” he said. “You can’t throw it late in the flat.”
Sanchez was the Can’tchise right from the start. He looked right, cocked his arm, pulled it down and had the ball swatted out of his hand by Reed, blitzing untouched from the quarterback’s left side. Jameel McClain’s six-yard fumble return made it 7-0.
The next time he had it, Sanchez fumbled the center snap but Shonn Greene recovered. Three-and-out.
Then, down 17-7 early in the second quarter, third-and-8, Sanchez seemed to muff a shotgun snap and Paul Kruger recovered the fumble, and soon it was 20-7.
“It was a little high,” Sanchez said.
But shouldn’t you have caught it?
“I’m back there, I should catch the ball,” he conceded.
It became a feeding frenzy as the Ravenous sharks smelled Sanchez’ blood in the water. Overmatched Vladimir Ducasse, installed as left guard when Matt Slauson temporarily replaced Colin Baxter at center, allowed Haloti Ngata a bone-crunching, backbreaking hit on Sanchez, who was too busy checking for body parts on the ground to notice Jarrett Johnson rumbling 26 yards to make it 27-7.
Joe Flacco was terrible. And the better quarterback anyway.
“It needs to get better from my position first,” Sanchez said.
He has a sieve for an offensive line and the ground & pound is a distant memory. Alone on Sanchez Island.
“It’s tough not having an offseason to put the game plan together,” Holmes said. “It starts upfront with our big guys. They gotta do a better job of protecting Mark and Mark’s gotta do a better job of making his reads and getting the ball where he needs to so the playmakers can make plays.”
Crisis in Florham Park. Can’t be a playoff team if your quarterback is the Can’tchise.
“He struggled mightily,” Ryan said. “It wasn’t his best day, that’s for sure. But he’s our quarterback and I believe in him.”
He has no choice.
steve.serby@nypost.com