Perspective | All credit goes to the Ravens: They beat themselves

The response in that moment? The Ravens sent too many men on the field. It was the seventh of their eight penalties. There are now eight dreary, downtrodden months to debate which was the dumbest, at which point an AFC championship game that could have been theirs was handed to the Chiefs.

What a way to head into the offseason. The Ravens spent the past two months providing evidence — encyclopedic volumes of evidence — that they were in the conversation with the San Francisco 49ers as the NFL’s best team. When they thumped the 49ers by two touchdowns on Christmas, their argument seemed sturdy. The Super Bowl awaited.

And then Sunday, they melted down. There’s just no escaping it. In a 17-10 loss to the Chiefs — who will head to the Super Bowl for the fourth time in Patrick Mahomes’s six seasons as their starting quarterback — the Ravens came unraveled.

Everything you need to know from the conference championship games

“There’s not one play that defines a game,” wide receiver Odell Beckham Jr. said.

So true. Take a pick from this potpourri.

The team that led the NFL in turnover margin lost two fumbles and an interception and couldn’t force a mistake by the Chiefs. The team that led the league in rushes and rushing yards abandoned that formula, running fewer times (16) for fewer yards (81) than it had in any game this season. The team that had Mahomes and the Chiefs pinned at their 11-yard line with less than two minutes remaining in the first half committed a pair of personal fouls — the first on linebacker Kyle Van Noy, the second on tackle Travis Jones — to hold the Chiefs’ hands as it ushered them into field goal range.

“The only team that can beat the Ravens,” none other than Maryland Gov. Wes Moore (D) told The Washington Post’s Nicki Jhabvala before the game, “are the Ravens.”

That is exactly what happened Sunday. Mahomes gets due credit because he is monopolizing the postseason, making trips to the Super Bowl seem like trips to the supermarket. But even on a day when he hit 30 of 39 throws for 241 yards, a touchdown and — this is big — no interceptions, the takeaway wasn’t that Mahomes beat the Ravens. It was that the Ravens beat the Ravens.

“I’m not frustrated at all,” said Jackson, who had two turnovers in his previous seven games combined and two Sunday by himself. “I’m angry about losing. We’re a game away from the Super Bowl after waiting all this time, all these moments for an opportunity like this.”

That will be the takeaway for this team: a mighty dose of what-might-have-been to eat at the linings of stomachs for the spring and summer to come. Facing Mahomes in the waning moments of a one-possession game for the AFC title, and the league’s best defense put 12 men on the field? With a personal foul on linebacker Roquan Smith, the defense’s soul, to follow on the next play?

That was typical of Sunday. It also wasn’t the half of it. There is a list of sins to chew on. But in a game full of exchanges that the Ravens will rue in perpetuity, the one that straddles the third and fourth quarters will particularly cause some acid reflux.

For the better part of three quarters, Jackson had struggled to get the ball to any of his wideouts, who couldn’t get separation from the Chiefs’ pressing defensive backs. But late in the third quarter, with the Ravens trailing just 17-7, Zay Flowers sneaked behind the secondary. He was so open that he fielded Jackson’s arching pass almost like a punt, then wove his way through defenders to the Kansas City 15. The play was good for 54 yards, and a stadium that had been on edge all day pulsed a bit with hope.

And then Flowers popped up and looked at cornerback L’Jarius Sneed on the ground. He took the ball and spun it at the defender. Swagger? Maybe. A taunting penalty? Absolutely.

The 15 yards the Ravens lost there weren’t fatal. But they were typical of the self-inflicted nature of this loss. Four plays later, Jackson found Flowers on a crossing route. Sneed was all over him. As Flowers lunged for the end zone, Sneed knocked the ball out. Kansas City recovered in the end zone.

Had Flowers not taunted Sneed, might the Ravens have scored earlier? Impossible to say. What’s absolutely correct: The taunting was unnecessary. It gave back yards the Ravens had earned. And Sneed wasn’t going to let that be the final word on his day.

“It’s fun winning,” Flowers said in a despondent and quickly emptying Ravens locker room afterward. “When you get to the playoffs, you want to win. But sometimes the best team doesn’t always win.”

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The Ravens can head into next season believing they are the best team in the AFC, Sunday’s result notwithstanding. The reality is that — unless, apparently, you’re Mahomes — these opportunities are precious. Smith, in his sixth NFL season, said he talked with defensive end Jadeveon Clowney — in his 10th year with his fifth team — about that very notion.

“You just think about how hard it is to make it back to this position, knowing all the adversity, the obstacles that you have to go through to get to this point,” Smith said. “It sucks. You just really think about — it’s tough. And there’s a lot of things that has to go your way in order for you to get here.”

For so much of the season, the Ravens had forced things to go their way. A step from the Super Bowl, they inflicted damage only on themselves. That’s hard to escape in the moments after it happened. They may not escape it over the course of an offseason that is suddenly longer than any of them had planned.