Isaiah Likely's toe-and-a-shade-more, in and of itself and ever so slightly over the line at the back of the end zone, does not have the same historical import of, say, Kevin Durant's in the 2021 Eastern Conference semifinals. The Baltimore Ravens have 16 more games to prove their worth while those Brooklyn Nets went right to powersuck in a heartbeat, and by extension the Ravens could still affirm Lamar Jackson's place somewhere near the top of the universe. Observing the NFL has been reduced by its simpleton punditocracy to quarterbacks plus some other stuff, because the game itself is apparently too involved to make us think about more than just the one position. Every now and then, though, a big tight end’s big toe can be momentarily significant.
The NFL’s rolling Chief Show was not what the audience wanted from Thursday night's season opener. It wanted Likely to have both feet fully inside the white paint so that the compelling game everyone received could go on a little bit longer. Probably not that much longer—even in that universe where Likely, the Ravens' Kelce-in-training, gets credit for the touchdown he surely had scored, the Ravens probably push it all in on a two-point conversion try that either wins or loses the game. That would have been an act of starkest clarity that made people think more fondly of Ravens head coach John Harbaugh, but it is also academic. The good news was that last night’s game was so compelling that we would have signed up for 10 more minutes of it. The bad news was that it ended in anticlimax. Likely's toe was a quarter-inch too prominent and so a spectacular denouement shriveled to referee Shaun Hochuli declaring that Likely's heroics weren't heroics at all, and that everyone would have to clear the stadium and their living rooms. It was that rare case where virtually all of America’s unaffiliated millions of viewers would have preferred the incorrect call.
