The most endearing scene out of the Baltimore Ravens’ AFC Championship Game loss to the Kansas City Chiefs, 17-10, was the sight of Zay Flowers’ teammates attempting to console him.
Flowers is 23 years old. By all accounts, he’s a terrific football player and a terrific kid. But he’d just committed two blunders, one self-inflicted and one by the nightmare hand of fate.
Without those mistakes, the Ravens and Chiefs might have been tied, and we might still be watching overtime periods into the unforeseeable future.
But errors had been committed.
Flowers caught a Lamar Jackson pass for a 59-yard gain that sent the big Sunday crowd at M&T Bank Stadium into howls of joy.
Never mind the listless first half in which the Ravens’ offense only controlled the football for a miniscule nine minutes. Never mind the 11 straight passes the Chiefs’ marvelous quarterback Patrick Mahomes completed to open the game.
All that stuff was ancient history. Now it was the fourth quarter. And for an instant, as Flowers’ grab completed the 59-yard gain deep into Chiefs’ territory, all things seemed possible.
But then Flowers (and the referee crew) let it get away. Flowers stood over the fallen Chiefs’ defender he’d outfought for the ball. He hollered something nasty and spun the football on the ground.
Gee whiz.
For this, he got called for “taunting,” thus pushing the ball back 15 yards.
Was Flowers wrong to do this? Yeah, sure. It’s unsportsmanlike.
This, in a game in which mammoth men attempt to pulverize each other into physical submission, one player after another. And in a championship game with emotions riding high, they choose to enforce a call based strictly on attitude?
OK, Flowers was wrong. And so were the officials.
Then minutes later, it was Flowers again. This time, an apparent touchdown was taken away because, in his zeal to score, Flowers dived headfirst and fumbled the football a heartbeat before breaking the goal line stripe. Kansas City got the ball back.
And that’s where we saw the most endearing sights of the day. Nobody on the Ravens’ bench was berating Flowers. They were embracing the kid. They were his big brothers; they were his fathers.
They were sensitive enough to know that Flowers will carry this memory for the rest of his life, and they were smart enough to know that all are equally vulnerable in life and in football to mistakes of pride and errors of skill.
Flowers’ errors were committed before a nationwide audience of television watchers and a hometown audience of disappointed fans who’d imagined a trip to this year’s Super Bowl.
Some were no doubt pointing fingers at Flowers. They were blaming him for the loss. They should take to heart the reaction of Flowers’ teammates. They know how much the kid contributed, across a whole season, to reach this championship game. And they were embracing him.
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books, including “Journeys to the Heart of Baltimore” (Johns Hopkins University Press) and “Michael Olesker’s Baltimore: If You Live Here, You’re Home” (Johns Hopkins University Press).
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