A Missed Opportunity

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Lost in a Moment

The Redskins stage a fierce but fleeting rally in the fourth quarter, but the Seahawks rebound quickly to put the game away and end a tragic and emotionally draining season for the Redskins, 35-14.

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With Jessica Simpson.

Yeah, you read me right. Cancún.

With Jessica Simpson.

You can't convince me that it gets juicier than that. The coach who built a Hall of Fame career by sleeping on the office pullout vs. the QB Romeo who obviously doesn't sleep on a pullout in the office.

They watch the NFL in Cancún, so Romo must have seen at least part of the game, right? Even if he and Jessica Simpson were canoodling in the penthouse all afternoon, that fourth-quarter score with the Redskins up one must have reached him somehow. Maybe somebody delivering room service or picking up laundry said something, that the Washington Redskins were on the verge of making another trip to Dallas.

Yeah, doggie.

And just like that, as quickly as the game flip-flopped the first time, it flip-flopped again.

With a chance to keep the momentum going, to keep the magical season rolling boldly into the front gate of Texas Stadium, the Redskins more or less blew it. When Shaun Suisham pulled that must-have 30-yard field goal attempt after the recovered balloon kickoff, the Redskins were no longer in control of the game.

Seattle's a very tough out at home, in the loudest playpen in the NFL. The Redskins were having trouble hearing their snap count, of which Kerney and the Seahawks took full advantage. But it's not like Seattle is Tiger Woods when it comes to closing; they've been known to let an opponent off the hook now and then.

But the missed Suisham field goal changed everything. Coaches and players like to talk about "all three phases" of the game and how no one play should be identified as determining the outcome of a game. But even Collins called coming away without points "pivotal. We've got to convert that into points, especially in the playoffs. That was a big missed opportunity. We'd have been up 21-13."

Kerney called it "the key momentum change" in the game: "I think that miss really fed us a great deal or energy and a great deal of emotion. From that point on, things went well and we just took control of the game."

Seattle drove for one score, Collins started to play like a backup coaches would rather leave in mothballs for 10 years, Romo was off the hook and Destiny's Team was headed for the longest imaginable flight east.

It's hard not to review the sequence and come to any conclusion other than the Redskins blew a wonderful chance at stealing a playoff game on the road.

Don't get me wrong: Seattle is a worthy postseason team, a division champ, a team only two seasons removed from the Super Bowl. They've got a great coach in Mike Holmgren, a big-time experienced quarterback in Hasselbeck and an exceptionally fast defense that, combined with the world's loudest crowd, confounded the Redskins most of the day.

Still, Seattle's one of those teams you never feel fully confident can play well a second straight week. And the Redskins seemed to have them solved at 14-13, even with the narrowest of leads and even with most of a quarter remaining. A chip-shot field goal would have kept the Redskins rolling. A stop, a few first downs.

It was all set up so perfectly until the blown field goal and the Collins interceptions. The sigh of relief you could hear. It's coming from Dallas, where the Cowboys, their coaches, a QB and his celebrity girlfriend all exhaled, knowing they don't have to fight off a blood rival with underdog status and absolutely zero pressure in a playoff game.

But the Redskins, for the first time since the Buffalo game at the end of November in the days following the death of Sean Taylor, made the kind of mistakes a team simply cannot overcome in the playoffs.

The Cowboys now get Tampa Bay or the Giants while Seattle goes to Green Bay and the Redskins empty their lockers, surely feeling they had just as good a team, perhaps a better one, a team on the verge of continuing a season, a team on the verge of one more improbable week and a playoff game that would have generated an absurd amount of interest.

Romo, whether he's in Cancún or back Texas, can roll over now, hit the snooze alarm and fall back to sleep.