Years from now, when this wild Sunday in Broncos history comes up in conversation, nobody will cop to leaving early.
Nobody will acknowledge that, yeah, they missed that finish.
That fourth quarter.
That comeback.
Heck, by Monday morning at the water cooler, every soul at Empower Field to start the game will have stuck it out to the euphoric-turned-bitter-turned-euphoric again end of a never-before-seen afternoon.
They weren’t the ones, they’ll say, responsible for the clogged exits after yet another lifeless Broncos offensive possession. Or for the wide swaths of empty seats in the upper deck that formed after the New York Giants put the game in a vice grip with a three-score lead late in the third quarter and put the Broncos on shutout watch.
To be fair, it’d be difficult to blame those who left, given what transpired through three quarters.
But then came the fourth.
Then came one of the nuttiest finishes those who stayed will ever see.
Then came the most prolific offensive fourth quarter in franchise history.
Then came four straight touchdown drives, what looked like a crushing response by the Giants and, finally, a walk-off, 39-yard field goal by Broncos kicker Wil Lutz.
The Broncos didn’t score for 45 minutes, 52 seconds. Then they put 33 points on the board in the final 14:08 and beat the New York Giants, 33-32.
As quarterback Bo Nix tried to gather his thoughts in the post-game chaos, he rubbed his hands through his hair and came to a simple conclusion.
“Well, I feel bad for the people that left early,” Nix told the CBS broadcast.
Nix had just followed an anemic first three quarters with a remarkable finishing kick for the second time in three games. This one, however, made erasing a 17-3 deficit against Philadelphia earlier this month look quaint.
“There was a time in the game when me and the boys were over there (on the bench), and I see one of them kind of counting,” said Nix, who is tied for the NFL lead since the start of last year with six fourth-quarter comeback wins. “I was like, ‘You know what, probably best we don’t do that.
“There’s a lot of numbers we’re going to have to count to.’”
Nix and the Broncos offense counted and counted and counted some more.
The Broncos’ second-year quarterback became the first player in NFL history to log two touchdown passes and two touchdown rushes in a fourth quarter.
In the final 15 minutes alone, he tallied 220 yards (174 passing and 46 rushing). That followed an opening three quarters in which he completed just 11 of 25 passes and tallied 107 total offensive yards.
Going back to the start of a Week 4 win against Cincinnati, Nix himself had accounted for four touchdowns in the previous 210:25 of game time for the Broncos.
Then he put four straight on the board in 12:17.
For most of this game, Nix, head coach Sean Payton and Denver’s offensive operation had almost exclusively bad on their side of the ledger.
Their opening eight possessions featured six punts, a turnover on downs at the end of their lone productive drive and an aborted drive that went backwards in the final 64 seconds of the first half.
By the time the fourth quarter started, Denver trailed 19-0, and the fact that Nix had the team in scoring territory seemed almost academic.
“I was thinking about how I was going to answer questions if we got shut out,” Nix said.
Teams that led by 19-plus after three quarters in NFL history won 99.3% of the time, according to the Associated Press.
A loss seemed almost a formality.
What followed on this day was anything but.
Put it this way: The fact that the first two scores of a 43-point final frame — a 2-yard Troy Franklin score for the Broncos and a 41-yard Theo Johnson touchdown for the Giants — each came on deflections might not crack the top five craziest happenings in the final 15 minutes.
At that point, the Giants led 26-8.
Teams that led by 18 with six minutes left in regulation, as the Giants did, had won 1,601 straight times dating back to 2003.
The Broncos put that streak in jeopardy first when Nix sandwiched a touchdown run and a short scoring pass to rookie running back RJ Harvey around a Justin Strnad interception.
They took their first lead of the day on a slickly designed quarterback run from Nix 18 yards around the left end for a 30-26 advantage with 1:51 to go.
Still, the closing stretch had more madness in store.
New York’s response drive featured a conversion on fourth-and-19. A roughing-the-passer penalty on John Franklin-Myers. A defensive pass interference on Riley Moss that put the ball at Denver’s 2-yard line. And a ballistic Sean Payton dash onto the field to protest the call that led to another flag and the distance to the end zone cut to a yard.
It featured Giants coach Brian Daboll inexplicably trying to call a timeout after Dart was ruled short of the end zone only to have the call overturned and the visitors back in front with 37 seconds to go.
It featured, critically, New York kicker Jude McAtmney missing a second extra point of the day to go along with a failed two-point conversion, resulting in a two-point lead rather than three.
Then Nix completed not one but two balls down the field — something he did virtually nothing of through three quarters — first to Marvin Mims Jr. on the dark side of field goal range, and then to Courtland Sutton deep into it on a play Payton essentially drew up in the dirt during a Saturday film session and installed at the team’s walk-through. That just happened to be attended by about 120 former players in town to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Denver’s most recent Super Bowl win and the induction of late wide receiver Demaryius Thomas into the team’s Ring of Fame.
That it was Sutton, then, who learned so much from Thomas early in his career and carries so much of the late receiver with him still, who made the play to set up Lutz’s game-winner, can only be described as fitting.
For much of the day, what was supposed to be a celebratory weekend looked headed for disaster on the field.
Instead, the Broncos roll into Week 8 alone atop the AFC West for the first time since Week 4 of the 2016 season.
They are winners of four straight and eight in a row at home.
They are keenly aware that they can’t get away with playing like this, and they also planned to bask in a wild win for at least a few hours Sunday.
“Belief is a mother-(expletive),” Franklin-Myers said. “It got us this win, for real.”
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