CHARLOTTE ó There is no Hallmark card for a loss like this.
No sentimental wish, heartfelt words or humorous thought could soften the pain of a 10-point underdog forcing the Panthers to face their football mortality Saturday night.
“It’s just a terrible feeling,” safety Chris Harris said in Carolina’s morgue-like dressing room at Bank of America Stadium. “A feeling you never want to have. But I hope it sticks with all these guys and they bounce back next year.”
Strange that the Panthers ó and not the victorious Arizona Cardinals ó were the division champions looking toward next season. This is a team that promised a statement game, then had nothing to say. But slaloming through the tricky banks of postseason play is a dangerous endeavor.
“If we play that team tomorrow or yesterday, it might be a different outcome,” DE Julius Peppers said after a game fraught with turnovers mercifully ended. “But we played them on a bad day. And when you don’t play well, that’s what happens.”
It started happening midway through the first quarter, when Arizona quarterback Kurt Warner tossed the first of his two touchdown passes, erasing an early Carolina lead.
“That was just a bunch of guys putting their minds together and playing great football,” Warner said after completing 21 of 32 passes. “We never panicked. We always believed in ourselves, even when no one else did.”
Anyone who believed the Cardinals had no chance in this one was proven dead wrong. Arizona treated the Panthers like uninvited guests at a biker’s convention, steamrolling to a 27-7 halftime lead and then high-fiving its way back to the desert.
“At this point you either win or go home,” said Carolina lineman Travelle Wharton. “There’s no in-between. It’s a shame because we had something going here, but we made all kinds of mistakes. You hope to go mistake-free and turnover-free and gradually get to the Super Bowl. But when you lose, it’s really devastating.”
Carolina has the rest of the winter to dwell on this six-turnover debacle. What had been a wonderful, magic carpet ride of a season is over ó and there were plenty of fingerprints on this mess. Most glaring was quarterback Jake Delhomme, who had a 34th birthday he’d rather forget.
“It wasn’t just him,” Peppers insisted, trying to stretch a smile across his broken heart. “You can point the finger at any group you want to. It wasn’t one person or one group. It was everyone’s fault.”
By the second quarter, this game started to feel like a car wreck in slow motion. And by the time Delhomme threw his fifth interception early in the fourth, it was nothing but a deathwatch.
“That is the cold, hard truth in the playoffs,” said veteran kicker John Kasay, last of the original Panthers. “In those three hours, everything that happened during our season, everything that worked so hard to accomplish, doesn’t mean a thing.”
The Panthers were good at one thing ó emptying the stadium early. Most of the 73,695 paying customers gave them a standing evacuation with 10 minutes to play.
“It’s all on us,” said Lucas. “We didn’t do our part. They came in here and showed they deserved to be here. They played like a true playoff team today.”
And the Panthers, quite plainly, did not.
“We went 12-4. We won the division,” said gravel-voiced coach John Fox. “Now we’re like everyone else who doesn’t win the Super Bowl. It doesn’t matter where you lose because it’s all a disappoint except for one team.”
And especially for this one.
–
Contact David Shaw at dshaw@salisburypost.com.