Nothing lingers in the aftermath of failure quite like the decision not taken that could have become success. Thus, the Baltimore Ravens will spend the next eight months asking why, with their last chance to advance to the AFC championship game against Kansas City, they chose not to make the safe and logically defensible play to save themselves with their most reliable weapon. With two yards and two points to gain that would have put the Ravens in a 27-27 tie with the Buffalo Bills, they decided not to use running back Derrick Henry to get them, and the result will operate as a trigger for years of recriminations, because that's how sports works—the losses always linger longer.
And the most maddening thing for the Ravens and their fans is that the play they called that would have tied the game worked brilliantly, all the way until the moment that ultra-reliable tight end Mark Andrews dropped the sure-thing conversion pass from Lamar Jackson that brought the Ravens down. It was a simple physical mistake, not a miscalculation or a mental blunder, that sent the Bills to their annual date with Kansas City this coming Sunday, and for Andrews, who had also fumbled earlier in the fourth quarter to help the Bills take an eight-point lead, the agony will be a tattoo on his chest that can be summoned on demand by NFL Films.
Maybe Henry, the second-best running back in the league, would have failed to get those two yards and the Bills would have won anyway. But the percentages are the percentages, and they are infallible in hindsight because that's the nature of the percentages. They do what their wielders command them to do.
Baltimore was in many ways the better team Sunday, but they were also the less tidy team. Their three turnovers and other ball-handling errors on a Scottish-level winter evening in Orchard Park negated the 143 extra yards they gained against the smaller but feistier Bills. They had the flashier plays, but the Bills stuck to the grim business of survive-and-advance, and the once-too-daring Josh Allen won new converts as the smart, safe, and sensible quarterback of the future. He threw for half as many yards as Lamar Jackson and offered almost no frills on a night that would have punished them, but rushed for two of Buffalo's three touchdowns and ran a coldly efficient offense that would have made Vince Lombardi smile.
And yet the game still boiled down in the end to Andrews's baffling drop, the kind of play that never dies. Ask Dallas Cowboy Jackie Smith, who dropped what would have been the likely clinching touchdown in Super Bowl 13 and even now is remembered more for that than for making the Hall of Fame. Ask Pete Carroll, the Seattle Seahawks coach who had a chance to win Super Bowl 49 but decided on second-and-goal from the New England one-yard-line with 26 seconds left not to run Marshawn Lynch, the dominant figure in his offense; instead, Russell Wilson was intercepted by Malcolm Butler, the Patriots won, 28-24, and Carroll and the Seahawks never got another chance.
The Bills, conversely, are known as the team that always positions itself for another chance. This is their third time in four years to confront their tormenters in a showdown game, and in that time Allen specifically has morphed from the loosest cannon in the artillery depot to one of the game's two or three most reliably great quarterbacks. He has broken his swashbuckler programming to become the guy who does the job as it presents itself. He is among the game's safest bets because you bet on him to fail at your peril. He has thrown only six interceptions in 531 passes. The only things keeping him from being named the best quarterback in the game are the fact that Patrick Mahomes has three-fifths of a fistful of championship rings and that Lamar Jackson continues to play football.
And today, he is no further along in breaking that enforced template than he ever has been. Even last night, when the Ravens were down 27-19 with three minutes left, Jackson drove Baltimore's hopes into the end zone with six smart completions, including a 24-yard score with 1:33 left that would have, and maybe should have, tied the game. Again, narratives vary depending on the outcome desired by the wielder, but the narrative that is true ended up slithering through Andrews's accursed hands. Jackson did everything and still somehow hadn't done enough.
Within a couple of days, the AFC divisional game in Buffalo will become about the Bills and their heroic survival on Snowy Sunday. And then it will all become about the AFC championship and Buffalo's search for final exoneration after all the close calls that never got close enough, juxtaposed against Mahomes's advanced search for full Bradyhood. In January, only the winners get to talk.
For now, though, this is about Baltimore's agony, and the alternate universes that would have protected them from this version of hell. And nobody knows it more, feels it worse, or will wear it longer than Mark Andrews.
