One yard from a first down and victory, Baltimore Ravens head coach John Harbaugh could be seen bellowing to his quarterback, "Lamar! Do you want to go for this?"
And Lamar Jackson most assuredly did and Jackson most emphatically sealed a pivotal 36-35 win over the Kansas City Chiefs on Sunday night, gaining two yards on fourth-and-1 from the Baltimore 43-yard line.
“I was like, man, I gotta get this first down no matter what,” Jackson told reporters after the game of the play that came with 1:05 left.
When Harbaugh asked Jackson prior to the play if he wanted to go for it, the coach admitted it was somewhat of a rhetorical question.
“No there wasn’t," Harbaugh answered when asked if there was any doubt he would go for it. "Maybe I wanted to be sure myself. I knew he was gonna say yes. But we were going for it, definitely.”
Harbaugh's decision to go for it added 25 percent to the win probability, per Next Gen Stats.
The two-yard gain capped a comeback win for the Ravens that rescued them from another defeat to the Chiefs and an 0-2 start to the 2021 campaign.
Instead, Jackson's Ravens are 1-1 despite Jackson having turned the ball over twice in each of the first two games and he won for the first time in four meetings head-to-head with Patrick Mahomes.
"It feels good. It feels good to get that monkey off our back," Jackson said, via ABC Baltimore's Shawn Stepner.
Jackson threw a pick-six on Baltimore's first possession of the game to Tyrann Mathieu and tossed another one to the Honey Badger in the opening quarter.
It was a bad start that hardly foreshadowed the great ending to come.
Jackson finished the game going 18-for-26 passing for 239 yards and a touchdown, and added 107 yards and two touchdowns on 16 carries. Those three touchdowns all came in the second half.
It was a 2-yard Jackson touchdown run with 14:13 to go in the game that cut the Ravens’ deficit to 35-30 and it was a Jackson 1-yard rush that vaulted Baltimore to its first, last and only lead of the game at 36-35 with 3:14 left.
Then came the 2-yard fourth-down conversion that showcased Jackson’s ability in the clutch and his coach’s confidence in him.
“Man, no matter what, getting that first down,” Jackson said in his NBC postgame interview of what was going through his head. “Coach asked me, ‘Should we go for it?’ I said, 'Hell yeah.'
“We had to get it.”