The ball took a weird bounce, and for a second it sure looked like Randall Cobb had a chance to squeeze it, fall into the end zone, and give the Jets a win that would have been among the most impossible in team history. But Cobb couldn’t grab the ball. It fell harmlessly to the ground. The final gun crackled.

Patriots 15, Jets 10.

There would have been a cascade of boos at that point, but about two-thirds of the 80,878 who’d braved the miserable afternoon were not available to boo, most of them getting a head start on the way home. Maybe they booed inside their cars on the Turnpike or the GW Bridge. Maybe they opted for music instead.

“I should’ve made that play,” Cobb said. “We should’ve won that game because I should’ve caught that ball. That’s on me.”

It was a stand-up gesture by a stand-up guy, but anyone who’d endured the whole three hours of NC-17-rated football knew better. Cobb was more than welcome to take his share of the blame as part of the ensemble of misery that doomed the Jets on Sunday, one of about 53 players and 26 coaches, although seeking 0.79 percent of the blame isn’t quite as forceful as the whole boat.

It was an appropriate play on which to dwell, though, as the full extent of the dreadfulness of this game began to really sink in. There is a name for that last play, one invented (and perfected) by Roger Staubach almost 50 years ago: Hail Mary. It was literally a wing and a prayer, one last heave from Zach Wilson that wound up being the last of his 18 incompletions.

And Hail Mary is the theme of the day this day.

Because that is what the Jets’ season has already become, a long, extended and utterly deplorable Hail Mary. Three games in, it feels like the Jets are already just throwing their hands up, tossing spaghetti against a wall, hoping it sticks.

“That,” Jets coach Robert Saleh would say, “simply wasn’t good enough.”

You didn’t need a PhD in coaching to recognize that. It goes without saying that Wilson was awful because, sad to say, he’s almost always awful. But this was another week when the running game wasn’t much help. It was another week when the opposing quarterback, Mac Jones, didn’t need a spare jersey because the one he started the game in never even collected a fingerprint, much less a turf stain.

And it was another week in an endless, brutal cycle of weeks, when the men who run the Jets essentially closed their eyes and hoped — metaphorically, closed their eyes and heaved one 50 yards downfield, hoping for a miracle. There’s a word for this, too, one folks use for doing the same thing time after time and expecting a different outcome: insanity.

And the Jets are suffering from team-wide delusion if they believe this will all just fix itself.

“We’re still early in the season,” Saleh insisted, and technically he’s right. But the league’s strata has begun to form and the Jets — for all the alleged fear their defense is supposed to inspire — are several rungs below even the most basic-competent teams in the NFL because they have an offense that’s about eight furlongs past dysfunctional.

This is a team crying out for a change, one that can only be provided by the highest members of the organizational flow chart. That means Saleh, who has to figure out a way besides glad-handing and happy-talking his players — specifically his quarterback, but all of them — and figuring out a way to make what they have palatable and competitive.

Nathaniel Hackett has to be better at his job, which means making Wilson better at his. This may not be the gig Hackett signed up for when he thought Saleh had allowed him to put the band back together with Aaron Rodgers, but that’s too bad. This is the job now. As George Young liked to say: The guru had better start guru-ing.

And that goes for Joe Douglas, too. There has to be another option that he can identify, someone who can come in and serve as a fail-safe for when Wilson has days like he had Sunday, days when he looks positively befuddled trying to play quarterback in the NFL. He has to give Saleh an option, a legit option, and that has to happen soon.

It’s early? Sure it is. But the Dolphins suddenly look like a football version of the old Showtime Lakers. The Bills have recovered nicely from opening night. Hell, every week even Joshua Dobbs is giving the Cardinals a fighting chance — even against the Cowboys, whose defense Wilson and company made look like the ’85 Bears last week.

There’s a reason why you only see Hail Marys in the most desperate moments. They almost never work. They aren’t designed to work. You certainly can’t build a game plan around them and absolutely can’t build a season around them. The Jets better figure that out quick.