Two hands are better than one foot, as the Colorado Crush proved Sunday at the Pepsi Center – especially when those hands belong to Arena Football League star Damian Harrell.
In one of the weirdest scenarios – even in the memory of veteran coach Mike Hohensee of the Chicago Rush – Harrell’s hands decided the issue with one second to play. The Crush offensive specialist leaped to make a jump-ball catch for his fourth touchdown as the defending AFL champion Crush defeated the Rush 65-56 before 14,832 fans in the teams’ season opener. The touchdown, an extra-point kick by Clay Rush and a safety on the game-ending kickoff produced the Crush’s nine-point victory.
“The way I separate myself from the rest of the league is going up and making those plays,” Harrell said. “When they call my number, that’s what I want to do.”
“We were taking one shot,” Crush coach Mike Dailey said of the last- second touchdown instead of trying a field goal when the game was tied 56-56. “If we didn’t get what we wanted, we’d throw it out of bounds quickly. But we got what we wanted, one-on-one with Damian.”
Crush quarterback John Dutton put the ball where it had to be on the first-down play from the 11-yard line. The winning touchdown pass was a shot of redemption for Dutton, who threw an interception with 4:08 left. Defensive back Russell Shaw picked off Dutton’s pass at the Chicago 1.
Other than the interception, Dutton had a superb opener with eight touchdown passes, tying a career high. He hit 22-of-34 passes for 291 yards and wasn’t sacked.
But the Rush converted Dutton’s interception into quarterback Matt D’Orazio’s fifth touchdown pass and tied the game with 47 seconds left on its fourth two-point conversion.
Perhaps the most important event occurred before the game, when the Rush lost kicker Keith Gispert to an injury.
“I’ve never had that happen before in my life,” Hohensee said. “He (Gispert) pulled a groin kicking an extra point in warm-ups. It changed the whole game plan. We drew a lot of things up, we made some things up and improvised some things as we went along.”
But with no kicker in the Rush’s game plan, the burden was put on the Crush defense. It meant Chicago was going for it on fourth down the whole game, and going for two points after almost each touchdown.
The Rush tried one extra- point kick early in the game, by defensive specialist Todd How- ard. But it didn’t come close to being successful.
“It was a game of ‘ifs,’ but we played like a veteran group at the end,” the Crush’s Willis Marshall said. “We ran the time down to a second at the end of the game, and that was big.”
With the Rush minus a solid kicker – reserve quarterback Michael Bishop kicked out of bounds on four kickoffs – Colorado had solid field position all game, starting at the 20.
On the plus side, the Rush converted all four if its fourth-down tries, some that probably would have been field-goal attempts had Gispert been able to play.
But fullback and linebacker Saul Patu created the turnover the Crush needed when he knocked the ball from Chicago’s Henry Douglas on a kickoff return at the Rush 9. Harrell’s third touchdown catch of the game followed, and the Crush took a 49-36 lead with 16 seconds left in the third quarter.
Staff writer Irv Moss can be reached at 303-820-1296 or imoss@denverpost.com.
