Spine-Tingling Ending Fitting for Horror Show

The clock went 0:05, 0:04, 0:03, 0:02 with the football floating in mid-air. Cheerleaders dressed as harlequins, harem girls, Elvira and Catwoman followed the football with their eyes, some through Halloween masks. The ball plopped against the crossbar at 0:01 and flopped backward at 0:00. The Raiders got treated. The Oilers got tricked.

Houston’s kicker, Al Del Greco, missed a 52-yard field goal because he kicked the ball 51 yards, 6 inches. Houston’s quarterback, Billy Joe Tolliver, sagged to his knees on the sideline in distress. Houston’s even sadder coach, It’s Jack Pardee And He’ll Cry If He Wants To, stood there like he had just seen a ghost. The Oilers had just lost to the Raiders, 17-14.

You want sadness? Here’s sadness:

“Same book, different chapter,” Pardee said, oh so sorrowfully.

You want relief? Here’s relief:

“Adversity can be ugly as mud,” Raider tackle Jerry Ball said, philosophically. “What you got to do is take mud and make it taste like sugar.”

You want confidence? Here’s confidence:

“Didn’t matter to me if he made that kick or not,” Raider guard Kevin Gogan said, strangely, since the kick would have tied the score. “We would have just driven the other way for a touchdown.”

But, uh, Kevin? The clock read 0:00.

“Confidence, baby,” Gogan said, grinning. “Confidence.”

Most of the way, this was one witch-ugly football game. The ball squirted from players’ fingers like a greased pigskin and the Raider and Oiler offenses were a disgrace to their American Football Conference ancestors. Until the wild ending, this was a game NBC-TV should have yanked off the air to show “Heidi.”

Customers actually did leave. Hundreds headed for the exits after Houston scored a touchdown with 3:19 remaining, as though the actual time remaining was more like 0:19. Many frankly doubted that the Raiders had a touchdown left in them. The way Harvey Williams and Jeff Hostetler had handled the ball all afternoon, it was obvious that their favorite Halloween candy must be Butterfingers.

You want guilt? Here’s guilt:

“It’s like our offense did everything in its power to lose the game,” said Raider receiver Tim Brown, himself a part of that offense.

Weird and spooky things kept happening. Mike Jones did a swoop-and-scoop of a loose ball in an attempt to pull off a miracle run a la Robert Bailey, but nearly pulled a Leon Lett no-no instead. Dan Land dropped a potential interception that couldn’t have been delivered into his hands more safely had it been brought by Federal Express. And unlucky Robert Jenkins got caught holding on back-to-back long gainers, until even a 28-yarder by Williams wasn’t enough for a first down because the Raiders were penalized halfway to Malibu.

The Raiders were in danger of a 3-5 record and a long, long, long, long November.

Yet somehow by the time the fourth quarter crawled to the two-minute warning, the Raiders found themselves only 11 yards from a big, big, big, big touchdown. Their bacon had been saved more than once by the defense, specifically by Chester McGlockton and Nolan Harrison playing patty-cake until they decided which one would cause the fumble and which one would recover it.

Then the hookup of Hostetler to Williams got its act together. And Hoss found Brown, who tip-toed out at the 11. And into the game ran a big old tight end, 6-foot-4, 245-pound Jamie Williams, to line up just in front of another big tight end, 6-6, 245-pound Andrew Glover, for a play called as a pass, not a run.

But the Oilers came with a nine-man, kill-or-be-killed blitz. And Hostetler noticed, just in time. The quarterback called an audible, the way quarterbacks are supposed to do when they see something they don’t like. He found Brown for an 11-yard touchdown, and when Brown came down, he fell into the arms of a great big bearhug by great big Jamie Williams.

That was that, except for Del Greco’s 51 1/2-yard boot.

“I said 51, ain’t but a few players can make that,” the Raiders’ Anthony Smith said. “I said no way.”

Tim Brown said the same. He said, “No way this guy will make this field goal, 52 yards, on the grass, especially since he’s a (Astro) turf kicker. I said, ‘It’s out of his range.’ And then I said, ‘No, it’s IN his range!’ ”

Pretty scary there, for a second.