Nothing much was at stake inside the crackling cauldron of a stadium. Only a football season. Only the razor-thin difference between hopefulness and hopelessness, the even slimmer margin between defiance and despair.

Russell Wilson had spent so much of this second half looking like a cooked quarterback, and the surplus of the 76,387 who were backing the Broncos had let him know about it. But now they formed a deafening sea of orange, a symphonic cacophony trying to deliver the home team to the finish line.

Sometimes it feels like you can actually see momentum sprinting from one huddle to the next.

Momentum seemed to be on the dead run, less than 30 seconds left in this odd, quirky and altogether strange football game, fleeing the Jets, dashing toward Denver …

And then Quincy Williams tackled that momentum in the open field.

Actually, it was Wilson that he flattened, and as he did that he jarred the ball loose, the ball spinning toward the sideline and then hopping helpfully up into the hands of Bryce Hall, and a few seconds later Hall was in the end zone. The Jets were going to win the game, 31-21. They were actually going to fly home with a season still intact.

“I trust my teammates, and they trust me,” Williams would tell SNY in the seconds after the final gun echoed inside Empower Field at Mile High, where boos and catcalls and all manner of bile had suddenly replaced the helpful, hopeful roar. “Keep fighting. Always keep fighting.”

A few days after Williams’ defensive coordinator, Jeff Ulbrich, had said of him, “there’s not a better linebacker in the league right now,” Williams backed up his coach’s words and buoyed his team’s spirit. And so the Jets are 2-3 and not 1-4, and there is still a season, a real season, left to play for.

“It wasn’t pretty,” Jets coach Robert Saleh said. “There are a lot of things we have to improve on.”

He’s right about that, of course, about all of it. The Jets didn’t play anywhere near as good in beating the Broncos as they’d played in losing to the Chiefs a week ago, and it felt like they were flirting with calamity the entire game.

There was the hard-to-believe sequence at the end of the first half when Zach Wilson somehow forgot to throw the ball either out of bounds or into the end zone and so the clock melted away without the Jets even attempting a chip-shot field goal.

There was the Jets’ final possession just outside the two-minute warning in the fourth, when Wilson was picked off by Denver’s Patrick Surtain when a first down would have sealed the game and a field goal would’ve given them a little more breathing room. Somehow those six points left on the table didn’t come back to asphyxiate the Jets.

But on this day, there would be precious little breathing room, and not only because of the altitude. It was at 4:37 p.m. when the Jets had played their first snap of the season with a lead — actually, impossibly, it was the first time any NFL team that calls itself “New York” had played such a snap. It was a lead that lasted all of six minutes in real time.

“We should’ve had an easier time today,” Breece Hall said.

Of course, it was Hall who actually provided the paddles to the Jets’ chest, dashing 72 yards for a touchdown on the Jets’ first play of the second half and giving them the lead for good, celebrating the end of his “pitch count” with a 177-yard outburst that allowed offensive coordinator Nathaniel Hackett to claim sweet revenge over Sean Payton. A year after blowing out his knee on this very same turf, Hall is emerging as one of the most dynamic runners in the sport.

“He’s pretty good, isn’t he?” Saleh said with a smile.

He is good. The defense, despite looking soft and vulnerable early, bit back. And in between his two red-zone brain cramps, Zach had the better of the Battle of Wilsons, 19-for-26 for 199 yards and some awfully clutch throws.

“I feel like I’m getting there,” Wilson said.

The Jets can feel that way, too. They are 2-3, with a rough date next week at home against the Eagles — all-time record: Eagles 12, Jets 0 — before the schedule gets significantly more manageable the rest of the way. A loss Sunday and it would’ve been hard to keep thinking of the Jets as serious playoff hopefuls with a straight face. It’s still going to take some kind of push over the season’s last 11 games.

But it’s reasonable to think they aren’t much worse off now than they would’ve been if Aaron Rodgers’ Achilles hadn’t gone all Vesuvius on him. Their season easily could’ve died a mile above sea level Sunday. It doesn’t. Hope lives. And so does a season.