“Improbable” doesn’t do it justice. Once again, a Browns game came down to a new brand of wild finish. Like a blackjack player steadily losing his shirt who then pushes in the rest of his chips for one last hand, Cleveland saved the season’s face with an ace and a Q. As in Quincy Morgan.
Oh delicious iorny: he’s the same wideout whose last-minute “catch” last year was reviewed and overturned after the next play had been run, a ruling that cost Cleveland a chance to come back against these same Jaguars. That ball hit the ground, followed by scores of those infamous plastic beer bottles. This time, the review was inconclusive. On his one-handed grab of Tim Couch’s 50-yard desperation heave, the ball may very well have touched the turf. But the cameras didn’t catch it. A good deal, for once. Good to the last drop?
At 7-6, the Browns’ playoff hopes survive for another week. With the Steelers losing to upstart Houston, despite outgaining them by a staggering 422 to 47 yards, Cleveland is just a half game from leading the division.
This was the latest of so many recent Browns games that would make a great sports movie, if only the plot wouldn’t be laughed off as too bizarre to be believed. Truth is indeed stranger than fiction. But the lingering thought survives: were the Browns resurrected four years ago as an experiment in performance art, ala pro wrestling? How else can all these outlandish endings be explained?
A Goliathan lineman named Zeus is felled by a yellow hanky. The dreaded Steelers get another chance after a blocked field goal. The Bears score three TDs faster than the average instant replay challenge. Bottle-gate. Rudd’s heedless, headless helmet hurl. Holcomb’s goal-line pick thwarting a miracle comeback against the Ravens. The Hail Mary in New Orleans. Dawson’s game-winning field goal with the clock running out against Pittsburgh. Two 14-point fourth-quarter comeback wins over the Titans. Looking in my literary glossary, this phrase stands out: “…the sense that the human condition is essentially and ineradicably absurd, and that this condition can be adequately represented only in works of literature that are themselves absurd.” Or, we may now safely add, in Browns games.
