The clock read 0:00, but Matthew Stafford kept scrambling, kept surviving, kept searching for a way to keep alive a game initially declared dead early in the first quarter. His heart raced at a velocity comparable to the rockets fired from his right arm.
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He finally found Calvin Johnson in the back of the end zone just milliseconds before an equally frenetic Cleveland rusher not so subtly introduced himself to the quarterback’s exposed left shoulder.
“I threw it up and then got planted,” Stafford said.
Like this Lions’ season, things went dark for the rookie. He didn’t know what happened until center Dominic Raiola frantically tried picking him up off the turf.
“I’m telling him there was a pass interference,” Raiola said. “He’s got to get up. We got another play. But when I grabbed him, he moaned in pain, and the trainers told me to leave him there.”
But Stafford’s greatest escape came just minutes later on the sideline, eluding team physicians determined to examine the shoulder. Stafford wouldn’t let them. He overheard on the Ford Field loudspeaker that the Browns had called time-out, giving his adrenaline another 90 seconds to anesthetize the intense pain.
“It was my left shoulder,” he said. “I don’t need it to throw. I told (the trainers) to help me up, but they weren’t going to help me up, and then I really told them to help me up, and they helped me up and I ran out there.”
Legends aren’t born, fortunes suddenly reversed in games matching the equally wretched.
Stafford’s 1-yard touchdown pass to fellow rookie Brandon Pettigrew on the extra play for a 38-37 victory doesn’t change the pathetic course of this franchise — unless, of course, they get Cleveland on the schedule for the remainder of the season.
It’s a win. That’s all.
Maybe that’s enough when you lose as imaginatively as the Lions have during the past two years, but the scintillating drama of the closing seconds doesn’t conceal the horrors of the first 59 minutes, when the Lions and Browns provided irrefutable evidence as to why they’re unmistakably the worst teams in the NFL.
