George Kimball America at LargeJoey Harrington may be the best-known American football player in Ireland, primarily because his cousin Padraig is a golfer of some repute. It's safe to say nobody in Ireland knows Don Muhlbach's name, but that's okay: until last Sunday afternoon, few Americans had heard of him either.

Joey Harrington is the quarterback for the Detroit Lions, although many Detroit fans have increasingly come to wish that he weren't. For several weeks now, denizens of the Motor City have reflected their displeasure by booing Harrington, whom some blame for the team's mediocre record.

Muhlbach is the Lions' long-snapper, and in that esoteric speciality is called upon to perform for only a handful of plays in a game. He is the guy who puts the ball into play on punts, field goals, and extra points. It's a pretty thankless job even when it's done well, and until last Sunday Muhlbach had performed it flawlessly.

Harrington has struggled along with his team, which went into Sunday's meeting with the Minnesota Vikings with a 5-8 record. That slate would be disappointing by almost any standard, but in this lopsided season Detroit actually retained hopes of a play-off spot with three games to play. (At least one 8-8 team from the NFC is going to qualify for post-season play, while at least one AFC team with a winning record is going to be eliminated.)

For several weeks the Detroit fans and talk-show hosts had been clamouring for coach Steve Mariucci to bench Harrington in favour of back-up Mike McMahon, and on Sunday morning Mariucci considered doing just that - not because he had lost confidence in his quarterback, but because when Harrington reported to Ford Field he was doubled over with a severe case of the flu.

By the time his team-mates began to arrive at the stadium the first thing they saw was Harrington, curled up in a fetal position with an intravenous tube pumping fluids into his body. He was trying to catch up on his sleep, having spent the previous night repeatedly retching.

"Joey was bound and determined to play," said Mariucci.

The unforgiving audience booed Harrington when he was introduced, booed him when he took the field with the offence and booed him when he trotted off the field after the Lions' first, unsuccessful, series of downs.

"He could've folded it up when the crowd booed him on that first series," said Lions' centre Dominic Raiola, Harrington's friend and sometime minder who had accompanied him to Oakland Hills to watch Padraig perform against the Yanks last September. "Everyone has been questioning him, and I think he really wanted to show something. He fought (quite literally, in fact) his guts out."

Despite his infirmities, Harrington also showed a previously undisplayed proclivity for throwing caution to the winds, abandoning what some had criticised as a cautious mentality for that of the riverboat gambler.

"I'm tired of walking off the field and saying, 'We had a shot in this one'," the quarterback would explain later. "F*** it. Go for it. If you lose it, you went down in flames."

Harrington threw for a career-high 361 yards against the Vikings, including a pair of touchdown passes in the fourth quarter. Early in the period he engineered an 82-yard drive culminating in a touchdown strike to Roy Williams, and then, after Minnesota scored to retake the lead at 28-21, he marched his troops 80 yards in nine plays, hitting Williams for another touchdown with eight seconds left.

At this point Harrington jogged back to the sideline and began to prepare himself for overtime, which would ensue as soon as Jason Hanson kicked the extra point; for years the Detroit placekicker has been money in the bank.

Muhlbach squatted down over the ball, and at the signal propelled it back to holder Nick Harris. But instead of the bullet-like spiral he had perfected in practice, the ball squirted back like a runaway bowling ball. It took a couple of end-over-end bounces, and by the time it finally reached Harris, he had no chance. He had barely picked it up when he was swarmed under by a host of charging Vikings.

To place it in perspective, it was as if Padraig had lined up for a three-footer to tie the match on the 18th green at the K Club and then putted the ball into the Liffey.

"The thing is, he's a really good snapper. It just went wrong this time," said Hanson of Muhlbach. "The ball just bounced away to where Nick couldn't get his hands on it. There's a point of no return in the routine where the kick just can't happen and we ran out of time. Plan B? Sure, there's a Plan B, sure, but this time the Vikings brought the house. Nick couldn't do a thing."

"I'm in shock," said tackle Jeff Backus. "What have we done to deserve something like this?"

"I don't know what happened," Muhlbach would sigh afterward. "It must have slipped out. I do know I let down 52 people who had played their hearts out."

The loss was the Lions' seventh in eight games, and was easily the most heartbreaking. It effectively ended Detroit's play-off hopes, which hadn't been all that great going in.

"We fought back and we should have tied it up," said Hanson. "Losing on an extra point is about the worst way you can lose a game. Everyone showed great character and everything, but I think we're all tired of character tests. It's just crap. We didn't make it and we lost."

"Three years of coming up close," muttered Joey Harrington. "I'm tired of it."

Muhlbach was, understandably, inconsolable.

"The guys all told me to keep my head up," said Muhlbach, "but that's hard to do right now."