Jets know 'go time' has arrived

PITTSBURGH

Dustin Keller knows there's nothing more to say. After all the talk and all the bravado and all the bluster, it has come down to this: One game, one chance, one moment. Nothing more than that.

"We realize the opportunity that is in front of us, and we know it doesn't come around very often," the Jets tight end said.

The opportunity might never be better than right here, right now. Jets-Steelers, Heinz Field, AFC Championship Game, with the winner reaching the Super Bowl. It is the moment Rex Ryan has talked about since he barged in through the front door of the Jets' organization and set about the Herculean task of lifting this oft-frustrated franchise to the heights not seen since that wondrous evening in Miami more than four decades ago.

Forty-two years, to be exact.

Joe Namath's finger wagging to the sky as he jogged off the field at the Orange Bowl after the greatest upset in NFL history, that slow-motion moment captured so magnificently after the Jets' 16-7 win over the Colts.

Forty-two years.

A huge number of Jets fans weren't even alive to experience the moment. And who knows how many who did experience it didn't live to see another moment - this moment.

It might never come again.

"I look at guys like Jason Taylor and LaDainian Tomlinson, and they've played all these years and never even been to a Super Bowl," Keller said. "That hits home. They tell us all the time to seize the moment, and I think you have to do that. I'm a younger player, and I've experienced some success early on, but it's never handed to you. It's never guaranteed."

Forty-two years.

"This is why you play, for a chance like this," Darrelle Revis said. "We got to this [AFC title] game last year, but we didn't make it, so we've got another chance to take that next step. It's up to us to take advantage of it."

Defensive tackle Sione Pouha will embrace the moment, just as he did last Sunday, when he walked into Gillette Stadium and fed off the energy from Patriots fans who were screaming their pregame invectives.

"You walk in, and you see those Patriots fans, and I looked at every one of them and stared them down hard," Pouha said. "Little did they know I was feeding off of them. We're in enemy territory, and we're going to make things happen. We plan to do the same thing for this one."

They are set up so perfectly to get it done. Mark Sanchez is showing why the Jets swung the blockbuster trade to draft him; the big-play quarterback is playing big in these playoffs, just as he did in last year's. The running game is operating at optimum efficiency with Tomlinson and Shonn Greene leading the way. And Ryan's defense is playing brilliantly, vanquishing the two greatest quarterbacks of our era, Peyton Manning and Tom Brady, in successive weeks.

And now there's Pittsburgh's Ben Roethlisberger, who already lost to the Jets at Heinz Field last month - the Jets' first victory in eight games in Pittsburgh.

"I can assure you we're going to play well, and I can assure you that team is going to get everything we have, just like always," Ryan said. "We know what's at stake here."

What's at stake?

In a word: everything.

Forty-two years.

And no guarantees that they'll ever get this chance again.

Look at their history of frustration: Leading the Colts 17-6 in the first half of last year's AFC Championship Game before giving up 24 unanswered points. Leading the Broncos 10-0 in the second half of the 1999 AFC title game before giving up 23 unanswered points. Bogged down in a 14-0 loss to the slower Dolphins in January 1983 after rain fell for several days on an Orange Bowl field that was left uncovered.

Take it from Tomlinson, who one day will make it to the Hall of Fame but so desperately wants to get there with a Super Bowl ring. "I think everybody understands where we are, and knowing this doesn't happen often and how special it is," said Tomlinson, whose only other AFC Championship Game appearance was a loss to the Patriots in which he spent most of the game on the bench with a knee injury. "You never know when you're going to get the next opportunity, and they can look at guys like myself and Jason Taylor, even Shaun Ellis, to see that."

Forty-two years.

It's time.