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LANDOVER, Md. - It took a while, as these things tend to do, but finally, Ronde Barber was able to put aside his disappointment. After all, there were other issues at hand.
There was, for instance, the matter of your disappointment.
For those of you interested in being comforted, you are not alone. Barber feels your pain. He knows what you're thinking. He knows you might still be sitting in front of your television, your eyes glassy with shock, the soda still soaking your shirt from when you squeezed the bottle too hard.
Barber stood by his locker long after most of the players had cleared out, and for a moment, he tried to swap places with those Bucs fans staggered by what they saw, and what they did not, in Tampa Bay's 16-10 defeat at the hands of the Washington Redskins on Sunday.
"I'd tell (a flustered Bucs fan), it's only one game," Barber said. "I'd tell him we played better in the second half. I think we have a lot of talent on both sides of the ball. When we show it, we're a pretty good football team. When we're not executing, it looks like it did.
"I'd tell him to be patient. I'd tell him we'll do better next week. I'd tell him to change his shirt."
Of course, this is what players from losing teams do. They ask for judgment to be withheld, and they talk about how things are going to get better, and they remind you there are a lot of games to come. Besides, if you are going to be consoled by anyone, wouldn't you prefer it to be Barber, who leads the Bucs in touchdowns this season? (From the look of the offense, it is a designation that might stand for a while.)
On the other hand, if you are to believe in a better day by the Tampa Bay offense, there is this lingering question:
How?
As opening acts go, this one was particularly awful. Seventeen games after winning the Super Bowl, the Bucs were reduced to bit players in that snazzy new film: The Return of Joe Gibbs. Early reviews suggest that Gibbs looked his age. On the other hand, so did the Bucs.
If fans of Tampa Bay know nothing else, they know the look of a lousy offense, and this was awful by any standards of which you can fall short. For all the exports, for all the imports, for all the ejections, for all the defections, for all the headlines of reconstructive surgery, the Bucs came up with ... this?
They looked slow without being methodical, old without being savvy, different without being better. The Bucs scored 10 points, but really, the offense had nothing to do with any of them. On Sunday, this offense couldn't have plugged a toaster into the wall.
For all of the changes, the new offensive line looked very much like the old one. The running game averaged 2 yards. The receivers plodded. The Bucs went six series before getting a first down, and with a chance to pull out a victory, suffered three straight sacks to end the game.
Add it all up, and here is the sum of the parts:
Yuck.
Hey, I know what you're thinking. The Bucs had a lot of new faces in the huddle. For that matter, the Redskins didn't exactly stand pat from a year ago, either. New coach. New defensive coordinator. New quarterback. New tailback. Old success.
Hard to believe, isn't it, that so recently they left this turf with a winning record. That was after the fifth game a year ago, when Tampa Bay was 3-2. Since then, the team has gone 4-8. The only thing that has plummeted harder is Steve Spurrier's reputation.
Look, the scary thing here isn't that the Bucs lost. Hey, half of the NFL lost this week. It isn't as if anyone expected Tampa Bay to go undefeated.
However, it is possible to lose and give people a reason to hope. You know, a play here, a preview there, a spark of electricity, that sort of thing. That didn't happen, either. The Bucs were punchless, powerless, promiseless.
That's the frightening thing about Sunday's game. After a while, you felt less like you were watching a competition than coming attractions. You felt not only like you had seen it before (oh, for the last 28 years or so), but that you were likely to see it again.
So now what? That's the important thing, isn't it? Just like that, the concerns have gone from who has left to who remains. The Bucs aren't going to get younger, and they aren't going to get faster, and they aren't going to sign a lot of new players.
"We go back to work the way we have," coach Jon Gruden said. "I think we've got a lot of pretty good football players. We have to execute better."
Old John McKay lines aside, execution would be a good idea. It could help open the 10-yard pass, the 5-yard run, the first-down success. It could make a defensive coordinator do some work.
If you draw anything from Sunday, however, it is this: Once again, the burden is on the Bucs defense to keep victory possible. Once again, the challenge is for the defense to knock the opposing offense around until it is as confounded as its own.
In the meantime, it wouldn't hurt if Barber could score a few more touchdowns.