SAN DIEGO — Rex Ryan was fresh off the win of his life, fresh off the call of his life, fresh off giving the kind of postgame victory speech a lot of coaches go their whole lives practicing for and never get to deliver.
The Jets coach had nearly collapsed both of offensive coordinator Brian Schottenheimer’s lungs with a victory hug. Ryan had led what Calvin Pace would call “the loudest singing of the Lord’s Prayer that I’ve ever heard.” He had taken a blowtorch to 41 years of frustration and futility and failure, nudged the Jets to within a game of the Super Bowl, kept alive his famous itinerary.
So did you expect him to get bashful now?
“We’ll see what happens in the match-up that probably nobody wanted, but too bad,” he said, that toothy smile now stretching from here to LaJolla. “Here we come.”
CBS’ DIERDORF OFF BASE ON JETS-COLTS REMATCH
PHOTOS: JETS BEAT CHARGERS, 17-14
Here the Jets come, Indianapolis. And here they are, New York. Here they are, exactly where Ryan had guaranteed they would be from the moment this crazy, wonderful season started turning upside-down for them.
They are tough sons of guns, and unshakeable, and playing as well as anybody still alive in these playoffs. Three other teams came into the weekend the same as the Jets had, first-round winners carrying momentum into their divisional games. Two of the three were smaller underdogs than the Jets. All three got flattened.
And the Jets march merrily on.
RAW AUDIO
REX RYAN ON THE JETS’ WIN OVER THE CHARGERS
MARK SANCHEZ ON HIS TD PASS TO DUSTIN KELLER AND FACING THE COLTS
DARRELLE REVIS ON HIS VINCENT JACKSON INTERCEPTION
BART SCOTT: “WE’RE READY TO SHOCK THE WORLD”
“See, I think everyone just believes we’re a team that acts like we’re confident,” tight end Dustin Keller, emerging as a significant January hero, said when this 17-14 victory over the Chargers was complete. “But here’s the thing: We really believe it. We really believe we belong.”
Said Thomas Jones: “And nobody can say otherwise now.”
Not now. Not after this. Not after the Jets hit the Chargers in the mouth repeatedly, ransacked their pinball-machine offense, wrecked another season in the sun. They got after a quarterback most thought they never would touch; they rattled Phillip Rivers — thought to be un-rattle-able — and they made every big play available to them.
They trailed 7-0 after a half and 7-3 after three quarters but then, on the third play of the fourth quarter, Mark Sanchez scampered out of the pocket, looking, searching, an army of Jets fans praying he wasn’t about to go all Richard Todd on them. He looked some more, searched some more, and then found Keller in the back corner of the end zone.
“That one,” he said with a laugh, “had some gas on it.”
It was 10-7, Jets, and Qualcomm sounded like someone had vacuumed all the voiceboxes except for the 5,000 or so Jets fans, all of them practically delirious, all of them shouting themselves hoarse. Shonn Greene added his weekly burst of heroics, a 53-yard touchdown dash that made it 17-7, and now it was time for a lot of Jets fans to quietly depart 2010 and wander back in time, to all the awful endings that have connected every season from here back to 1969.
Only they forgot something.
The “Same Old Jets” are dead. The New Bold Jets keep getting after the quarterback, keep hitting, play smart. It was the Chargers who picked up four personal fouls. It was the Chargers who committed every killer turnover. After the Chargers closed the gap on a late touchdown, Ryan later was moved to say, “I want to apologize for playing soft there at the end. We wanted to take some time off the clock.”
If you are a fan, how do you not love that, or Ryan’s decision to go for it all on fourth-and-1 with a minute and change left in the game? How?
Damien Woody brought his two Super Bowl rings to work with him yesterday, wearing one on either hand. Alan Faneca has one. That made the trip, too. They didn’t say a word. They didn’t flash them.
“Just a message,” Woody said, smiling.
“Just a chance to show what the prize is we’re playing for,” Faneca said.
Maybe until now, that still seemed an abstraction, still too far away to touch. No more. The Jets are 60 minutes from the Super Bowl. Sixty minutes from a Possible Dream. Sixty minutes from playing a Super Bowl in Miami.
They’ve done that before, you know.