New York, N.Y.: A city on ice gets its heart stomped on twice

They tried hard to forgive kicker Doug Brien the night he almost single-footedly lost the divisional playoff game for the New York Jets. The way one fan explained it, straining to be fair, “He didn’t actually lose it, he just didn’t win it.”

As the contest with the Pittsburgh Steelers ended in overtime after Brien missed two field goals in regulation play -- either of which would have given the Jets an unlikely victory -- a moan went through the Resette restaurant on West 45th Street. You could hear it practically all the way to Central Park.

It was full of pity and despair, the mournful sound one makes when a good friend dies, or when a game, on the edge of victory, ends in defeat. They might have made that sound, for instance, when mighty Casey, the baseball hero of Ernest Thayer’s poem, struck out. There was no joy in Mudville then, and there isn’t now.

A man drinking at the bar later that fateful evening placed it in almost Shakespearean terms when he offered dramatically, “There was blood on the field today.”

Another, nursing his gin and tonic, added, “People are crying in the streets.” It was as though the Yankees had just been sold to Des Moines.

For those who do not follow pro football, perhaps otherwise occupied with the study of Chaucerian literature or Euclidean geometry, the Jets were playing the Steelers last Saturday in a game on track toward Super Bowl XXXIX next month.

As I understand it, they were craven underdogs in the contest but managed to tie the game at 17-17. I happened to be in New York at the time and had come out of an icy evening for dinner at Resette, an Italian restaurant of warmth and good smells. The weather outside was 22 degrees and threatening snow, so to be enclosed in the embrace of garlic and a working furnace was comfortable indeed.

Two television sets, one on each end of the bar, were broadcasting the Jets game. Everyone at the bar was transfixed by it, including two women who looked as though they were right out of “Sex and the City” and a French couple whom, I learned later, neither spoke English nor understood football.

Clearly, the game was special to those engrossed in its dwindling minutes of play. In the dining area, one of the TV sets was still visible to patrons seated in rows of tables on either side of the narrow room, and they watched the contest between bites of pasta and veal scaloppini.

I was drawn to the scene more by the reaction of the fans than by the game itself. When Doug Brien, a pleasant family man of 34, missed that first field goal with about two minutes left, there was a heavy silence in the restaurant. Had there been a grandfather clock in the room, you would’ve heard it ticking.

When he missed the second kick that could have meant victory and the game went into overtime, the moan went up, emerging from the very soul of a beaten people. I looked around the room, and there was disbelief and sadness on the faces of those at a large table crowded with what could have been a Mafia don’s family, at a booth occupied by young men of means, and at the table next to me where that couple from Paris settled.

During that Saturday evening and the next day, I heard Jets fans struggle to restrain themselves from damning both Brien and the failure of his foot to win the game for the old home team. It was cold, they said. It was windy. It was dark. Jets coach Herm Edwards added somberly, “Both of those kicks were long ones, that’s all you can say.” A Jet starter, speaking through a haze of grief, mumbled, “You realize how much more than just a game football is.” I thought he would cry.

Less forgiving in its tone, a half-page headline in the tabloid-sized Daily News growled, “A Kick in the Teeth.” One of those usually chatty morning show co-hosts observed grimly, “Once more, the New York Jets have pulled defeat from the jaws of victory.”

Brien himself, laden with guilt, told Newsday, “It wasn’t a fun ride home.”

In Paul Haggis’ flawless script for “Million Dollar Baby,” the Morgan Freeman character says to a would-be young fighter whose face has been pounded into hamburger, “Everybody loses once.”

You might say that Doug Brien lost twice in the same terrible game, for which he will probably be famous the rest of his life. Football historians and commentators will log the missed kicks as one of sport’s great tragic moments.

Everyone manages to lose at one time or another, often more than once, along life’s crooked road. I know from experience the horrific meltdown of career, and I also know that the memory clings like fleas on a dog, and you scratch the itch until it bleeds.

As for all that crying in the streets, New York is a tough town, a fact proved in far greater mishaps than the loss of a football game. But it would have been nice had the guy at least made that second kick.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be reached at al.martinez@latimes.com.