The game is slipping away, and with it, everything else. The season. The sweet story. The chance -- for James Ihedigbo and all he represents -- of a lifetime.

It's the third quarter of the AFC Championship Game and Baltimore Ravens quarterback Joe Flacco has seemingly become Tom Brady. On the Ravens' first possession after halftime, Flacco converts three straight third-down passes into the teeth of the New England Patriots' secondary. The last of the three goes for 29 yards and a touchdown to Torrey Smith. When Billy Cundiff tacks on the extra point, Baltimore leads for the first time, 17-16.

On the ensuing kickoff, bad downshifts to worse when Danny Woodhead fumbles on the return. Deep in the Patriots' territory, Flacco goes to work. On a second-and-7, he runs for 14 yards. Now, two plays later, he faces a third-and-8 from the Patriots' 9-yard line. As Flacco barks out the signals, Ihedigbo hovers just behind the defensive line, leaning forward, sizzling with anticipation.

"If it slides my way, then I read out. If it opens up, then I go."

***

Up in the family section, heart hammering, Rose Ihedigbo is on her feet. She is here at Gillette Stadium, of course. She's always on hand when James plays football.

It doesn't seem all that many years ago when she watched him play Pop Warner ball in Amherst, Mass. -- giving him permission to, in the context of football, hit his opponents. And wasn't it just yesterday when she was working the concession stands at the high school games? Or boarding a plane for Montana in December to see James and his UMass teammates win a critical playoff game? This is just part of the code for the woman her friends call "Dr. Rose": Be there for your kids.

Just a few days earlier, on a whim, from her home in Abingdon, Md., she had sent a text message to her son.

"I have a special request, James," she wrote.

"What is it?" replied the youngest of her five children.

"Could you sack Flacco for me?"

In a tense week of preparation for a championship game, this was a LOL moment. "He texted me back in capital letters, Rose recalled several days later. "I PROMISE."

***

Watching the game in his living room in Milford, Tom Cullen would love to see that sack -- but in the tense seconds before the ball is snapped, he doesn't dare to dream it.

Cullen had basked in Ihedigbo's blitzes back when he coached him at Amherst Regional High School. He gloried in Ihedigbo's full-throttle, ravenous, hell-bent pursuit of the quarterback while watching his college games at UMass. He swelled with pride from the couch when he saw Ihedigbo occasionally bursting into the backfield in his New York Jets' uniform.

But here with the Patriots, New England's team, that just wasn't part of the plan. Cullen had reveled in the fact that Ihedigbo had become a starter for the Patriots. How cool was that? But the Pats' defense almost always called for the strong safety to stay home, to keep the play in front of him. Cullen had seen just a handful of safety blitzes all year, and no sacks for Ihedigbo.

Cullen had been coaching in Massachusetts for 29 years, and if he were at the helm of the Patriots at this desperate moment, he might just roll the dice. But who was he to second-guess the master, Bill Belichick?

***

As Joe Flacco drops back to pass, the whole situation seems rather absurd. How did it ever come to this in the first place?

More than three decades ago, Rose Ihedigbo stepped onto an airplane for the first time in her life. Toting three children younger than 5 years old -- her daughter, Onyii, and sons Emeka and Nathaniel -- she said goodbye to her native Nigeria. Not goodbye forever, mind you. She and her husband, Apollos, were determined to remember, to give back, to help children in their native land. The path to paying that debt was education. That was the way to lift up their family so they could ultimately lift up others.

So on faith, she got on board and flew across the impossibly huge ocean, the long way to America, where Apollos was waiting. He had left months earlier to begin his studies at Houghton College, a small Christian school in western New York that boldly proclaims its mission as "transforming people, transforming the world."

How could Rose ever envision what life would become? How could she predict two more boys in the family, David and James? How could she plan for the shocking loss of her husband? How could she even fathom the idea of something called a text message, or the meaning of the words "sack Flacco"?

When the Ihedigbos left the snowy confines of Houghton for Amherst, where both Apollos and Rose would earn doctorates in education, this whole football thing was foreign territory. When James, at age 6, signed up for Pop Warner, Rose remembers that he used to stand on the sidelines and observe, reluctant to plunge into the contact of the sport.

In one sense, it went completely against the grain of family values. "We had trained him as a Christian," Rose said. "One of our values is you can't hurt your brother, don't hurt anyone. Live at peace with everyone. James took that to the field. He would stand and watch, instead of tackling and hitting."

Sweet Baby James wanted to please his family. He saw them scrapping and clawing. On weekends, he would join his parents and four siblings trolling the UMass campus, picking up recyclable cans that were tossed blithely away after Friday night parties and Saturday football games. The Ihedigbos would cart them home, wash them out, and bring them to Stop & Shop for redemption. James saw his father, a man who seemed larger than life, working all kinds of jobs with his eyes on the prize. Apollos was a janitor in the campus center. He delivered pizza for Antonio's. He was an ordained minister. He was an assistant director at UMass for a program that focused on the education of students of color. Work, work, work for the common good. How would a game as violent as football fit into that?

James' Pop Warner coach, Bryant Lewis, tried to explain that it was a physical game, that being aggressive on the field did not mean that you were a bad person. When James reported this to Rose, she smiled and said, 'If that's what your coach told you and that's how you play the game, then hit someone.' "

***

Even for Tom Cullen, concentrating mightily at the television set, the whole scene would seem -- if he were to step back from it -- kind of preposterous.

The Amherst that Cullen arrived in as the head coach in 1990 was a town with all kinds of notable history and virtues, but toughness on the football field wasn't one of them. Amherst was famous fundamentally for Emily Dickinson, alone in a room, writing poetry. It was a town that had made national news for the annual ritual of...