The NFL landscape already was littered with the corpses of teams that, like the Ravens yesterday, had to win to get in. Now, here were the Ravens, in front of an eardrum-shattering home crowd, seemingly positioning themselves for a chalk outline of their own. They trailed the hapless Jacksonville Jaguars 7-3 in the final minute of the first quarter.
So, Derrick Mason was asked afterward, there was a window there for the Jaguars to ...
"No, it wasn't," Mason immediately corrected. "Don't let anybody fool you that it was there. It was never there. Granted, they're a good team. But that window was never there, because we know what kind of a team we have."
The entire league knows, too. The Ravens slammed the window on the Jaguars' fingers, smoking them for touchdowns on their next three possessions, putting the game away, locking down the last AFC wild-card berth with a 27-7 victory at M&T Bank Stadium, and eliminating any need for them to have to watch the scoreboard, or anything with a scoreboard.
It's how any self-respecting team wants to earn its postseason bread, but it's what a lot of teams couldn't manage. The New England Patriots won their game earlier, but they needed the Ravens to lose. The New York Jets needed help and not only didn't get it, but also didn't help themselves. In the NFC, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers lost to the crummy Oakland Raiders at home, the Chicago Bears lost to the .500 Houston Texans on the road, and the Atlanta Falcons, Carolina Panthers and Minnesota Vikings barely scraped by against either inferior teams or those eager to rest players for the real season.
The only scraping the Ravens did - after the Jaguars crept to that early lead - was scraping their opponent off the bottoms of their cleats. Their extreme, season-long case of tunnel vision served them well again, and it guided them right into a rematch with Miami on Sunday.
One more time, John Harbaugh, why are these Ravens so good at keeping their eyes trained on the prize?
"We talked about it before. I know you guys laughed," the first-year head coach said, then laughed himself. "We have mighty men. We have a strong bunch of guys. They're resilient. They're rough and tough. They come to work every day, and they prepare. That doesn't guarantee you anything, but you have a chance to come out and play well every week."
