The saddest noise in sports is the sound of time running out.
As the football sailed through the uprights, every last held breath went out of an abruptly deflated stadium, with the realization all was lost for the Broncos. The game? For sure. The season? Kaput. An era? Say goodbye.
When it was done, when Denver had lost 26-23 to San Francisco in overtime, safety John Lynch dropped his helmet to the ground in disgust. As Broncos veteran Rod Smith walked alone toward the tunnel, you had to wonder if the 36-year-old receiver was gone forever. In a locker room where 300-pound men tried to turn invisible, center Tom Nalen sat as heavy and quiet as a rock.
Nothing lasts forever. So why does the end always surprise us?
“When the season ends, the feeling always is: ‘That’s it?’ It is abrupt. You don’t ever get used to that,” said Broncos kicker Jason Elam, who has been working in the NFL 14 years, yet still has trouble wrapping his mind around how suddenly your dreams can be done and gone. “It’s shocking. It really is. It’s shocking.”
This team looked tired at the end. This team acted old. While Champ Bailey, Jay Cutler and Javon Walker are reasons for future hope, too many important veterans, from Nalen to Smith to Lynch to Elam, are running out of time.
“If you don’t win the Super Bowl, the season is a failure. And I think that’s the way guys feel in this locker room,” said linebacker Al Wilson, forced to sit out the grim finale with a back injury.
“Guys like Rod and Lynch and (Keith) Burns and Nalen, those guys have been around this league a long time. They understand what it takes to be successful. They’ve all tasted what it means to win championships. And to go out like this is always tough.”
Playoffs? Don’t even mention the word around this town.
By losing five of its final seven games, this was perhaps the greatest crash in coach Mike Shanahan’s dozen seasons at the controls in Denver.
“It only takes one bad day,” Shanahan said.
If the Broncos, who blew a 13-0 lead against a visitor with nothing at stake, had a bad afternoon, the refs, who seemed unable to tell whether the football was inflated or stuffed, much less which player was in possession of it, were equally wretched.
But losers blame bad calls and use bad luck as a crutch.
The truth of the matter is this was a Broncos team in transition, facing a season of growing pains from the 29th day of April, when Shanahan decided to make a bold trade for Cutler. The future of the kid QB is bright, full of Pro Bowl potential. His arrival doomed Jake Plummer to the sad ending of a scapegoat.
For all the yardage Shana- han coaxed from Mike Bell, for the deft way he took rejects from a second-hand store in Cleveland and quilted a defensive line, for all the bright moves he made from New England to Pittsburgh, the way he kicked Plummer to the curb, allowing the organization to clumsily leak the imminent demotion of his veteran QB in the hours before Thanksgiving went a long way to destroying whatever mojo the team had built.
“It’s just terrible,” said Smith, who called the Broncos better by far than the 49ers. “We ended our own season. And that’s the part … it’s hard to take that. We were in control of our own fate. And we chose not to move forward.”
If this is the dawning of a new year, then why does it feel so stale?
The sun always rises. For the Broncos, it doesn’t matter. For Lynch, for Nalen, for Elam, time is the enemy. This is a team that has slipped.
Asked if he was ready to commit to another long, hard chase of the Super Bowl, Smith curtly refused to talk about himself.
“I’m done,” said Smith, abruptly ending postgame discussion of missed opportunities and regrets impossible to fix. Then he walked off without a sound.
The ugliest sound in sports is the silence of no tomorrow.
Staff writer Mark Kiszla can be reached at 303-954-1053 or mkiszla@denverpost.com.
