Titan Up

As many of us know, during week 6 against Philadelphia, our New York Jets will be sporting the New York Titans throwbacks. For a logo and jersey geek like me, this is going to be more enjoyable than I care to admit. When I told him about it, my father asked me how anyone really knows what Titan uniforms look like. "Did they consult the 500 people who went to their games at the Polo Grounds?" he asked. Until recently, I didn't even know what they looked like, and I'm the kind of guy who can discern the differences among the lettering of names on the back of the Jets' uniforms between 1970 and 1975.

According to lore, Sonny Werblin chose the Jets' green in 1963 when he bought the club because he himself was born on St. Patrick's Day. This was an improvement over the Titans organization and their aesthetic choices. Their owner Harry Wismer must have thought that if he cheaply packaged the Giants, then he'd cash in the way the Giants had. The Titans had chosen the Giants blue, Big Blue. To distinguish them from the primary football team of New York City, they added the flourish of...well, mustard yellow. Certainly an intimidating color. Ask the New Orleans Saints. This might explain why the recent revision of the Titans uniforms are the Giants' blue with Steelers' yellow, a harsher "tougher" yellow.

The current Titans of Tennessee are lead in the field by Vince Young. The mythological Titans were a race of figures who were precursors to the Greek Olympians. Eventually, they were replaced and imprisoned by the mighty gods themselves. Let's not remind Giants fans the fact that in many traditions, the original Titans were, of course, giants - especially since the Jets as Titans will be playing the Eagles in Giants Stadium.

Without an actual logo on their helmet, the Titans always looked like the team that the hero's team plays during a regular season showdown. Sort of like the Washington Generals or New Jersey Reds, whichever team was forced to play the Harlem Globetrotters. "I'm still unclear about this," Dad continued. "Are you telling me that the Jets are going to celebrate a legacy of mediocrity?"

Where to begin? First of all, I just saw the Complete History DVD of the Jets, and one could answer that question with a direct reference to the Jets' history itself. Yes, everyone deserves an historical appraisal on DVD, but in order to do so, Jets fans must admit that a celebration of that history must include a considerable examination of mediocrity, not to mention 1995 and 1996. In the first two years of their existence, the Titans were 7-7, only then to drop to 5-9 in 1962. They managed mediocrity. The Jets squads of the 70's could hardly claim the same.

Sure, there's plenty of humor in the Titans' history surrounding how Harry Wismer bounced his players' paychecks. As Larry Grantham once said, "We played like guys that would have played for nothing because we were guys who played for nothing." However, what interests me is the Jets' motivation for doing this throwback thing for the benefit of fans who know the history of their football team better than they know their own country's history. Who was the United States Supreme Court Chief Justice in 1963? "Whizzer" White? No. Who was the New York Titans coach in their final season of existence? "Bulldog" Turner? Correct. (Earl Warren was the Chief Justice)

This was somebody's idea in a marketing meeting. It's better than the idea the franchise had a couple of years ago of exploring as many of the diverse aspects of the color green as possible, an idea that did not hold together as anything other than a fancy proposal to Woody Johnson. New York Jets fans are not the kind of people for whom a dissertation on hues will be of any value. FIT spectrum analysis is best suited to erudite Giants fans. By the way, if you're wondering why the Titans logo on the Jets' website features the name "Titans of New York," it's probably because the actual, present-day "New York Titans" are the National Lacrosse League's representatives from New York. You can see them at Madison Square Garden, wearing blue and orange. They are not to be confused with the previous NLL team New York Saints, whom you could think of as the Titans' Titans in the same way that the Titans are the Jets' Saints. Got it? Great.

Since I live in Philadelphia, I will certainly enjoy how strange the response will be to the blue and yellow powerhouse that will play the Eagles in week six - that is, unless the Eagles choose to wear their beautiful 1940's baby blue and yellow throwbacks, in which case, the Titans may play in someone else's shadow again.

Other Camp Notes

Aside from real news emanating from Sunday's practice, some human interest truths. Above all, I am happy to report that there is indeed something here for the whole family. First, to my dismay, my wife was genuinely entertained by the the warm-ups. A) Because of the hip-hop soundtrack, which I will discuss at greater length and B) because she loves to see all the players' tight asses (though she has, unsolicited, offered the comment that white football pants are just a little too "hippy"). I've had to get guarantees of assurance from her that she doesn't just watch football to look at all that ass. It would be useless to begrudge her that, though. She loves football. I'll take it at that. Apparently, Justin McCareins has the nicest derriere. So, there you go.


The father-son moments in the stands were interesting. When I would go to games and practices with my father, he would always end up begging me to agree to go. I was in that golden time of spectatorship, between the ages of 6 and 12, and these little guys in the stands were maybe on the younger end of that spectrum. It was the boys (and a few girls) who were doing the wingeing. At first, the fathers were trying to narrate the proceedings, and obviously for some the whole affair was a rite of passage of sorts, which was affecting.

"Watch the man in the red shirt. He's the quarterback. Watch him, Tommy. Tommy! You're not watching!"

"I know nothing's happening, pal, but that's because it's practice. Daddy's trying to explain that."

"Billy, take the foam finger out of your mouth and watch the injured man. We have to see whether he gets up, Billy. He's a very important running back."

"Be a big boy and watch Ben Graham punt. Ben Graham. C'mon. Don't you wanna see the ball go in the air?"

Many of the kids wanted to go home, actually. By the time the practice appeared over at 4:15 pm and the team gathered in a huddle, the fans sensed that the proceedings were at an end, and a group of boys gave a weary cheer of relief. There was more to come, though. This appeased neither the hopeful autograph seekers nor the little boys who wanted a nap very badly, whether they knew it or not.

In other news, it was vaguely amusing to witness the Pete Kendall drama for myself. It's one thing to follow the dissatisfaction of a key offensive player in the news and quite another to actually see it silently but dramatically manifested right before your eyes. Aside from a generally acerbic manner of being, my wife and Pete Kendall also share in common the fact that they are both from Weymouth, MA. She believes she went to high school with several of the Kendall people. She was unhappy to see that Pete did not play well with others to the extent that the others on the offensive line were not standing with him on the sideline, nor he with them. He wants to be elsewhere, and the joke may be on Mangini in that he now needs Pete Kendall more fully at center. In any event, it was interesting to see the degree to which a millionaire player dramatizes both his sense of entitlement and his singular independence. When I told my wife that Kendall contemplated reporting the Jets' minicamp labor violations to the Players Association, she fell squarely in the corner of her fellow Weymouth native. My appeals to her for the need to build team morale fell on deaf ears.

Speaking of deafness, yes, the hip-hop. Sure. New to me. I heard Tupac, Eminem, and Lil' somebody. I'm not so sure that it will accurately recreate the noise that opposing crowds will make, if that is at all the issue. In the event there will be aggressive invitation to freestyle at Foxboro or Orchard Park while the Jets are on offense, our bulls will be ready. What I know of these fans makes me wonder why the Jets do not train, rather, to the haunting strains of Scorpion or Whitesnake. Is it an insult to use the genre as "noise?" I have to believe so, but in the world of football, attitude is everything - attitude given and received. The standards, quality and high aesthetics of music are not an issue in the NFL. Just ask the Bears Shufflin' Crew. Shufflin' on down. Doin' it for you.

And, finally, a Chad Pennington triptych, courtesy of my wife, who was clearly more interested in the human drama.

Chad and his receivers pensively reflect:


Chad perhaps dwells on his need to step up his game in the two-minute drills.


But is loose enough of spirit to offer a joke that plays on the word "rehab."

Oy Vei

Lots of things to talk about, most of which you've probably read about already. Kellen Clemens' continued progress. Thomas Jones' injury. Thomas Jones' injury.

Oy. There I am, enjoying a remarkably seasonable day in what should be the dog days. I am surrounding by what might be called the Jets Nation, mostly - you know - guys who look like me. Many hefty men in Pennington and Martin jerseys. And gals there, too, many of whom are dressed to the nines. Why? Because it's Jets training camp.

Think about it - any breaking news that comes out of training camp can't be good. "Kellen Clemens Improves!" just doesn't really have much strength as a headline. Even preseason wins, like the 31-16 win over the Falcons, aren't conclusive of anything, really. And to tell you the truth, it is very difficult to tell who is doing particularly well. There were a couple of people who dropped passes. That looked bad. Oooo, he's dropped two in a row. But really, I don't know anything better than the other schmo who pretends to know more than the other guys at the water cooler and urinal.

But when the big free agent get from last year's NFC Champion team goes down with a leg injury and walks off in a cast, everything, including everyone's breathing, stops on a dime. Yes, it was scary. It was scary the way it happened because I don't think anybody saw it happen. The backfield were doing blocking drills, which distracts you as much as Pong. But then again, what I was watching while Jones went down doesn't ring with me, either.

The next thing I know, there's the kind of commotion that develops when someone drops a fragile item in a store. Then someone goes, "That's Thomas Jones, down." No, I think. No. He'll get up. Get up, Tom.


Well, he did, and when he did, it became apparent that the entire bleacher crowd in the bright sun were watching his every move, for they applauded. Indeed, he stood, he walked, all of which may mean nothing bad or nothing good, for that matter. He was given all of the medical attention possible. I assume that the spiritual essence of the late great Dr. James Nicholas was also conjured. Or at least, it felt that way. There was profound gravity amid the faithful. "Oh, that's it," one guy said. "That's it. That's it. That's bad. That's as bad as it gets. It's over. We're done. We're done. If he's hurt, we're done." Either this guy hasn't been following football for very long, or he's been following the Jets for way too long.

The old Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times," applies here. You go to training camp just to see the players and feel like you are the kind of fan who knows more than the other guy. You're the guy who knows whether or not Cedric Houston is in the camp this year. But really, you really hope Nothing happens. If Something does, you might be in trouble. And by you, I mean we, and when I say we, I mean me.

Even as I write this, updates on his condition will be coming in. Or not. But being there helped stave off the feeling of powerlessness that fans usually feel when they have to rely on blogs reporting from Hofstra. Once Jones walked off in the cast (and apparently did less impact-based training with his teammates later on) one can actually see that, indeed, the practice goes on, so does the team, and that all is otherwise business as usual. All is not lost. For God's sake, I think. I'm worse than a Golden Retriever in a thunderstorm. Relax.

Unless of course we lose Leon Washington. Then I will really worry. Get better soon, Thomas Jones. Get better now.

Rip Van Roche

We have returned to the present, where we travel through lovely Hempstead to arrive in Hofstra University. Not much has changed about any of this area. In East Meadow, the businesses of the past have been replaced by new ones. My wife and I ate at the palatial Empress Diner. On the other side of the Meadowbrook Parkway, Hempstead is looking a little unhappy.

Hofstra is a suburban college that looks like the 1970's idea of a science fiction city. Non-descript concrete structures abound. Most things look the same everywhere, including the distinctions among towns - Uniondale, East Meadow, Hempstead. I do not know how to tell.

I was very happy to be there. A little too happy, maybe. I spoke with my Mom yesterday about one of her godchildren who is now a successful published writer. "Well," she said, "she's the kind of person who stays home and works. You drive two and a half hours away to see the Jets train." Correct. Guilty as charged.

Dreams and Numbers

It’s another dreary overcast afternoon in my dream. The air is that chill of winter that nags at you; it's not yet decided whether to chill just to one’s skin or to the bone. The environment is familiar - urban/suburban melded into an eclectic landscape that my subconscious has patched together from all the places where I’ve lived.

Sometimes my dreams bring me back to the town outside New York City where I grew up, and my teenage room comes back to me in dramatic detail. Sometimes I’m in the classroom teaching, as I do each day for a living during ten months of my waking hours, but it’s not the high school where I work; instead, it’s an amalgam of that place and my own high school, and the narrative can’t quite place me as either the teacher or the student, so I’m both, and I’m lousy at both, too.

Yet in this dream I retreat to an interior somewhere, and a woman dressed only in a football jersey comes up to me, approaching with the look of desire that takes me off guard. Thank goodness, it’s my wife.

I’m on my back and she begins undressing me. Her uniform is familiar - in this sense the dreamer in my dreams knows what I like; he knows his audience enough to know what works. It's a Jets uniform. When I dream of football games - not necessarily those I recognize, some I do - the dreamer in my dreams is always careful to make sure the details of the uniform translated accurately. The game doesn’t always have to be at the old stadium where I first went to see Joe Namath play some thirty years ago. Sometimes it’s an overcrowded suburb’s football yards just alongside the main road. But usually all my favorite players of the past are there, no matter what the setting, and their uniforms of kelly (if it’s the mid-70‘s) or forest green (from the 80’s) are rendered accurately. As my wife grabs hold of me, I notice the shiny reflection of the light’s glare against the rubbery white numbers “2” and “3.” She smiles.

****

I wake. I usually wake before it’s over. It must be something I trained myself to do growing up Catholic. I was a late bloomer in some respects. Late to lose my virginity, late to let go of adolescent ways of reacting to sex. Now that I’m in my late 30’s, I see now that many things are unlikely to change. The anti-depressants I take certainly make my libido an aged benchwarmer to the formerly irrepressible rookie star it once was. All such pleasures of the flesh have come under reappraisal lately - sexual antics, drunkenness, chain-smoking, painfully earnest, yet remarkably forgettable conversations about sports heroes and the like - all are characteristics of the old regime. And not just because I’m married now, but because that’s the way it must be, for the sake of my own sanity and self-preservation. Maybe you’ve crossed into this rite of passage yourself, wondering why you survived it for as long as you did considering how often you drank and drove around without a single consequence.

But some things will never change, and it may be that my football team, my most magnificent obsession of all, is simply next on the execution list. It seems impossible to imagine, for nothing in my life as superseded the magnitude of being a New York Jets fan.

In waking life, I bring my wife coffee. She looks at me.

"What?" she asks.

“Nothing,” I say.

“OK,” she says, sitting up, taking a sip.

She waits. After all, I have to say it before it leaves my memory. “It’s just that I had a dream about you and I having sex.”

Another sip. “Oh that’s nice,” she says. If not in real life, then certainly in the murky one. “Did we enjoy ourselves?”

“Yes.”

More time elapses. The radio goes on. The college station plays insufferable and gentle folk music for the purpose of making its hung-over listeners more likely to contribute at pledge time. “It was interesting,” I said. “You were wearing….a…”

She nods. She guesses it without so much as a flinch. “A Jets jersey.”

“God, yes,” I say. I can’t say I’m entirely surprised that she’s not surprised. “How did you know?” I feign amazement at her powers of observation. “Did you hear me say something in my sleep?”

No, she shakes her head, staring straight ahead. “I just know you. That’s all.”

Of course she does. “Whose uniform was it?” my wife asks after a few more moments. “Was it Joe Namath’s?” she asks.

I shake my head. This will surprise her, at least. “No. Shafer Suggs. Number 23.”

“Who?”

“Number 23,” I repeat. “Shafer Suggs.”

She sips. “Who's he?” she asks.

I nod, acknowledging Suggs’ relative obscurity. “He’s a defensive back from the late 70’s,” I say, matter-of-factly. “Seventy-five to ‘79. Then he went to the Falcons, I think. He played alongside Burgess Owens, who eventually went to the the Raiders.”

She is unimpressed with my mind’s Encyclopedia of Nonsense. The facts are usually all she wants. Unlike me, she has no place in her heart for nostalgia. She entertains the obscurity of the dream for a moment and then smiles at her own association.

“That’s the Patriots’ stadium,” she said. "Isn't it?"

She means Schaefer Stadium, not "Shafer" or "Shafer Suggs Stadium" either. It got renamed Sullivan Stadium. It used to be easier to identify teams’ stadium names when they weren’t ephemerally named for corporate sponsors. She grew up in New England. “I went there with Jim the Jock, and we saw a game there against the Jets.”

Jim the Jock. It turns out she was the kind of girl who wore her boyfriend’s football jacket. I clarify for her, though she won’t respond.

“The final score of that game of that 1981 game of which you speak,” I say, “was a blowout."

Turns out that in this sense, she is nostalgic after all. I, on the other hand sound like Rain Man. “Jets won the game. The final was 31-7.”

“He was nice,” she said. “He let me wear his jacket. It was so damn cold.”

I shake my head and mutter over the coffee again. “Shafer Suggs,” I say. “I’ll be damned.” I see him in my mind’s eye as he appears in the 1979 Jets Yearbook, which I promise myself I am not just now going to get up and look at just in order to verify that it appears exactly as I just now imagined it.

“What does it mean?” she asks hopefully. “The dream. Are you thinking about my date with Jim the Jock at Schaefer Stadium?”

No. “Have you been thinking about it?” I ask with a vaguely accusatory tone. I am insanely jealous by nature, as I am, after all, insane.

“Not until just now.”

“Good,” I say.

“Oh stop it.”

I shake my head. “No,” I said. “I wish I could say it was something significant.”

“Are you thinking about binge drinking?” she asks. She means Schaefer Beer. A fine diuretic as beers go. Schaefer is the one beer to have when you’re having more than one?” When you're getting wicked cocked, more like. Her mind is like a steel trap when it comes to ad jingles. This she recalls.

If the Mitchell and Ness vintage sportswear company put out a #23 Shafer Suggs jersey, they’d just be showing off. And I think that’s what my subconscious was trying to do - yank out an obscure name from the unfathomably deep structures of my Jets memory bank just to make sure I knew that it was on top of its shit. It went with the one thing that I feel only I can know with consistent, complete and total accuracy - obscure Jets players forgotten by time.

Let's see... Carl Barzilauskas. Wayne Mulligan. Kurt Sohn. Jazz Jackson. How could anyone forget a name that begins with a musical genre? And Carl Barzilauskas? What was his number again?

77. Of course.

Fanatics

I come from a long line of apparent fanatics. If family lore is to be trusted (should it really ever be?) my mother’s fraternal grandfather came from County Wexford in British-occupied Ireland to New York City in 1882. He belonged to a faction of the Irish Nationalist Fenian Brotherhood called the Invincibles - a name that seems today, to be honest, a little overly compensatory.

Nevertheless, Wexford had once received the worst of Oliver Cromwell’s murderous rampages across Ireland more than two hundred years before, so the county town was a place that nurtured a young man’s fanaticism. The Invincibles claimed responsibility for killing two British cabinet members in Dublin’s Phoenix Park in 1882, and among the members on a short list to be rounded up and interrogated was Joseph Barry, an apparently a card-carrying Invincible. While attending Mass (and where else would a good Irish Nationalist have been?) a note was passed to him via the collection basket (this is the best way for the Catholic Church to communicate with its congregants). The note read:

Joe,
The British are outside waiting for you. Go out the back.

Which he did. The Irish Nationalist always receives absolution from the Eucharist under such conditions. The next part of the story finds him taking the next ship out of Wexford bound, he thought, for Johannesburg, South Africa where he could join up with the Boers. However, he miscalculated and the next ship was actually bound for New York Harbor, which is where he eventually landed.

The entire story lacks details and, frankly, a little truth. Did he play any part in the murders? And what about those collection basket? Did he throw anything in? And if the British Empire could encompass the globe, couldn’t it as well send representatives who might have enough common sense to cover the back door to a local church? Even more suspicious is the assertion that Joe wanted to give aid to the rebellious Boers in South Africa, whose guerrilla war against the British would actually not get started for another 15 years. More likely he was a young man in over his head, and he ran for his life, which was a smart move. Maybe, just maybe, he left because his Mother Country was an impoverished hellhole.

According to my mother, Great Grandfather Joe became a ferocious American patriot upon his arrival, which shows just how much in the ordinary Joe might have been. Like most normal people, he followed a new home team when he moved.

His own son, my grandfather Mickey, inherited his father’s zeal and directed it toward following Notre Dame football, which was the Irish working class’ answer to the football-crazed Ivies. By all accounts, Mickey was a gloomy man, sometimes given to pangs euphoria only when Notre Dame won a Saturday football game, which would happen often during the years he followed them. No win was ever enough for Mickey Barry, for with winning comes inevitable losses down the stretch, too - maybe not next week, but some day. And then what'll happen?

His household was devoutly Catholic, and although Original Sin is a concept shared among Christian denominations, Catholics all the while fear that Protestants are right - that good works are a paltry gift to God. So a double jeopardy takes hold in the Catholic. In his heart an irrepressible sense grows that no good work is enough and that if the works are no good, then his faith is probably just a delusion (to Catholics, Protestants always seem to get away with a freer and happier conscience).

Thus, if original sin makes existence so hopeless, then how could dozens of Notre Dame wins give comfort for the suffering caused by one inevitable loss? Therefore no one approached Mickey in his despair during the week after a hard Notre Dame loss. Had this lugubrious man lived long enough, I might have actually witnessed in him a reflection of my own hopelessness with the Jets. Surely he would have agreed: No win is ever enough, and consciousness itself consists of a pervasive struggle against the dangerous comfort of hope.

The Nightmare

A moment of silence, if you please. This is difficult.

Fine. I'm ready.

Looking back on it now, it’s clear that the Jets' fate was sealed even before the game got started, when Pat Ryan pulled a groin muscle in warm-ups. He would re-injure it during the first half and would be replaced by Ken O'Brien, whose career had already begun its decline midseason after the fabled 10-1 start. Pat Ryan was forced to leave the game after throwing a thrilling 57-yard flea flicker to Wesley Walker that he threaded beautifully between Cleveland defenders. Jets 7 Browns 0.

Then O'Brien went a respectable 11 for 19 in relief of Ryan, but he couldn't quite convert on an absolutely critical third down quarterback sneak (a Pat Ryan specialty, I might add) on the Jets' very last drive of regulation time. Both teams played poorly throughout the game. Cleveland coach Marty Shottenheimer referred to it as "one of the finest games in the history of the sport," but we Jets fans knew better afterwards. The honest loser always sees the reality of the opportunities missed, and in truth the Browns played like shit most of the day as well, and it was simply we who made the most crucial mistakes at the most inopportune moments.

For example, the following can be recited from memory by many Jet fans: Jets 20 Browns 10. 4:14 remaining. Second and 24. Browns on their own 18. Late hit by Gastineau. Fifteen yard penalty. First down Cleveland.

Can you pin a collapse to a single instant? History provides so few moments, even if we study its snapshots. You can say World War I started because the Archduke Ferdinand was gunned down, but its causes are in its near and distant past as well. You can't just say that the Vietnam War would have been prevented if Kennedy had not been killed in Dallas. Would Dr. King have made people more aware of poverty in rural and urban America had he lived? How about an America without Nixon and Watergate because Robert Kennedy was elected President? What large, unwieldy conclusions have we developed to try and understand September 11? Historians know that our past is much more complex than we'd like it to be and that a single moment cannot provide anything more than a comforting, rationalizing antidote to history’s insanity.

However, let's be less globally significant. I would add that with its short seasons, football provides many such single instances, and that a single moment on January 3, 1987 changed everything for Jets fans. Freeman McNeil had run 25 yards for a seemingly consensus-rendering touchdown, making it 20-10 Jets over the Browns with 4:14 to go in the game. We were now so close. It had been a war between two vacillating forces until McNeil manfully took the reigns. We could breathe a sigh of relief for that single instant, yes indeed.

Encouraged by this, the Jets defense then held the Browns back on their next drive. With time ticking away, the Browns approached a crucial second down with 24 yards to go for a first down.

Concentrate. Concentrate. Don’t blow the lead. Please. Not again. I stretched my whole body out prostrate before the television. I had already chewed off the vestiges of my nails and now began at the cuticles and the raw skin. My mother came into the den and caught notice of this. I had been biting my nails for years, and of all of my many tics and my compulsive behaviors, it was my chronic, feverish nail biting that seemed to enrage Mom most. She told me that I wouldn’t be hired for a job someday because no one hires nail biters, but her claim backfired on me because my growing sense of justice told me that people who were obsessive-compulsive should not have been discriminated against any more than minorities, women and homosexuals.

Nail biters were treated unjustly, I concluded. She pointed out my hands to me in front of the game and reminded me of a bargain we had made when I was 12 that she would buy me a copy of Pink Floyd's The Final Cut if I swore off nail biting for a month. I went back to biting my nails after I got the album. It was clearly inferior to The Wall. I ignored her. It was Browns' ball, second and 24.

Quarterback Bernie Kosar threw an incomplete pass from his own 18. Yet, even before the camera zoomed to the endpoint of the play, I knew that something was terribly wrong. As they fell out of the frame, I saw Mark Gastineau apply a late hit on Kosar. I didn't see the penalty flag fall, and I made myself somehow believe that it was all going to be okay and that the hit was clean. It clearly was not. Gastineau pleaded his case to the officials as they awarded a first down at their own 33 to Cleveland.

From there, Kosar never looked back. The drive then continued until Cleveland's Kevin Mack made it 20-17 Jets. When O'Brien fouled up that crucial quarterback sneak on the Jets' next drive, the demoralized Jets defense then gave up the tying field goal to the Browns. 20-20.

Beyond that, I can offer no recollection, and perhaps it’s just as well. I literally cannot – or will not. Upon a visit to the 2001 preseason camp at Hofstra, I found a number of Jet fans that couldn’t talk about the 1986 AFC Divisional Playoff against Cleveland and would wave a hand as if to say, Please. I remember. I've never recovered. Simply put, the Jets fan marks history before and after that match up as two entirely different epochs.

At the expiration of the regular time, the two teams went into one overtime, and then another. More than two minutes into the sixth period, Mark Moseley won the game 23-20 for Cleveland with a 27-yard field goal. Apparently, Moseley had missed an earlier attempt in the first overtime, yet I remember nothing of the post-regulation time. It is repressed trauma. I suppose we all knew - from Flushing to Bayside, from Islip to Matawan - that it was inevitable that the Browns would win. We knew what we were looking at now that it threw off its disguise. Jets fans had come to know the teasing work of Fate so plainly now that the overtimes were merely perfunctory. Nothing could have saved us.

The collapse was so complete, so total that when it ended, Doug did not call (just as he had promised) but instead came to my house to offer solace. The absurdity of the Jets' losing on Gastineau's penalty made him want to reach beyond the barriers that separated us to touch an Untouchable with compassion. His eyes welled with tears.

“I don't know what to say,” he said. “I don't know what to say.”

In the present day, when I catch a student in my classroom or in the hall ways doing something so obviously wrong that he cannot explain it away, he nevertheless tries making several divergent, contradictory excuses at once in the hope that I will believe one of them. I didn’t do it. I didn’t mean to do it. Teenagers are generally used to being interrogated and yet are not equipped with the skills of escaping interrogation without being accused. Those conflicting explanations are usually the tip-off that he is guilty.

Quote Gastineau at game's end, trying to claim his penalty was not a late hit: “I couldn't stop," implying that he could not stop the momentum of his hit on Kosar. Then: “I’ve done that lots of times without being called."

Bingo.

It would be another five seasons before the Jets would be in the playoffs again.