ORCHARD PARK, N.Y. — Kyle Hamilton literally felt the game slip from his fingers.

If Hamilton’s wingspan were a full 80 inches instead of 79 3/4, he might have saved the Ravens from their latest disaster class. He might have sent 41-year-old Matt Prater’s 32-yard field goal attempt spiraling toward the sideline, destined to be remembered as the kick that almost completed one of the greatest meltdowns we’ve ever seen.

But no. Not quite enough. Hamilton instead felt the ball brush past his reach and finish the job in a crushing 41-40 defeat to the Buffalo Bills, the last team that kicked the Ravens in the shorts back in January.

“I don’t know whether it went under, over or through my hands, but I want that one back,” Hamilton said. “Shouldn’t have come to that point, but it is what it is.”

Over, under or through — it’s a perfect summation of how the Ravens let commanding leads wobble out of their control. No one in the NFL blows more surefire wins, and for a team as talented as this one, that’s really, really saying something.

It almost feels more unlikely that so many things could go wrong. Rookie Tyler Loop had to rush through an extra point attempt that wound up being unthinkably precious.

The Bills’ Keon Coleman had to come up with a touchdown pass that wasn’t even meant for him.

Derrick Henry, who made Buffalo defenders look as helpless as ragdolls in his wake for much of the night, fumbled for just the second time in his Baltimore tenure deep in his own territory.

“I told my teammates after the game that the loss is on me,” Henry said sternly, lingering on the one big blunder of an otherwise impressive performance. “I own it like a man.”

It’s good to hear accountability, Derrick. But don’t take it all on your own shoulders — a loss this bad takes a lot of help.

The mistakes feel incredibly improbable when you total them up. But then you remember you’re dealing with the Ravens. Losing a 15-point lead in the final 4:05 of game time is bad, but there’s a collection of terrible choke jobs over the last few years that make it look more like the story of this franchise rather than the exception.

“We just have to finish the game,” Lamar Jackson said. “It’s never over until it’s 0:00 on the clock. We found that out tonight.”

Why haven’t the Ravens found it out all the other times?

In 2022, they gave up 28 points in the fourth quarter after leading 35-21 against the Miami Dolphins. In 2023, there was the frustrating loss to Gardner Minshew and the Indianapolis Colts, followed by the galling letdown to Deshaun Watson’s Browns. In 2024, they choked away a two-score lead to the Raiders in the second game of the season and then found a way to fall in Pittsburgh when the Steelers failed to score a touchdown.

With this assembly of second-half meltdowns (and a few others that don’t even make that list), you could create the most demented scrapbook ever. And the biggest indictment of this franchise is that it does it more than anyone.

Next Gen Stats gave the Ravens a 98.9% win probability with 8:37 remaining. ESPN reported that the Ravens have blown eight games since 2021 in which they have had at least a 90% win probability — the next-closest NFL team has five.

It’s sort of a backhanded compliment, because only teams that are good at building leads in the first place could be in position to give them up. Even so, for a team that is as capable of winning as the Ravens are, you never want to give up the games that feel in hand.

As good as his overall record is, John Harbaugh has to own his team’s capacity for choke jobs. The Associated Press totals his blown second-half double-digit leads at 17. Harbaugh has made these disappearing advantages part of the Ravens’ brand like no other franchise — and for goodness sake, his brother coaches the Chargers, formerly the NFL standard-bearer for blowing games.

Even though this happens on a semiannual basis, no one can explain why the pattern repeats.

“​​I don’t know. I wish I knew,” Hamilton said. “Banging our heads on the wall about it at this point.”

Give Hamilton credit on a defense that gave up 389 passing yards — he was one of the few who acknowledged the compounding frustration of these losses. Marlon Humphrey and Roquan Smith, two of the well-paid veteran leaders on that side of the ball, left the visiting locker room before it was opened to media.

As good as Josh Allen was Sunday night, the Ravens’ toothless pass rush and sieve-like secondary helped flatter him and his beat-up receiving corps.

Allen’s heroics also cast a shadow on Jackson, who had all the motivation in the world to wipe the smile off the Buffalo quarterback’s face.

The MVP trophy that voters gave Allen probably should have gone to Jackson based solely on merit — and for about 50 minutes Jackson showed them what they should have seen in his case. Jackson, and only Jackson, can make a 20-yard sack into a 19-yard gain with his effortless scrambling, the Maserati of the gridiron to Allen’s ATV-like rumbling through defenders.

A win was there for the sealing, but Jackson said he couldn’t go for it because of cramping — “If I wasn’t, everybody in here knows I would’ve been trying to go for a fourth-and-3.”

There’s no reason to doubt that Jackson felt those cramps, but there’s also no reason to need to know about them. The only thing that matters is the Ravens didn’t go for it. Jackson couldn’t win the game. Allen could. It only enhances the reputation gap between them, because plenty of football folks seem to think Allen wins the big games that Jackson does not.

Jackson’s explanation also doesn’t account for the total evaporation of offense on the final three drives, any of which could have been the game-sealing one. Henry’s fumble took away one, but on the other two, the Ravens gained just 11 yards and zero first downs. The starring cast that piled up 40 points in the first eight drives simply shriveled at the moment.

Jackson is a fantastic player who has won big games as a Raven. But it’s not asking too much that he should lead the team to wins in games that appear safely in hand. If Allen can play fourth quarters like Sunday’s, Jackson should be able to get a few first downs on demand as he does in the other three quarters.

It’s that final quarter, those closing minutes that seem so tough for the Ravens to crack. Some of the faces are familiar and some of the culprits vary, but the one thing that never changes is that you can count on Baltimore to blow about two of these a year.

It’s discouraging for a team that preaches a need to work on the small details. It’s disheartening for a team outwardly focused on taking care of the ball and preventing turnovers. It’s dispiriting for a team that talks about walking the hard road of winning a Super Bowl but can’t even take the gimmes.

The Ravens have plenty of games left, and they’ll have plenty of opportunities, as they do every season, to turn around a disappointing start. It might help if leaders like Harbaugh and Jackson accepted that this is its own kind of trend.

There’s only so long anyone can accept looking at an empty pair of hands, wondering how the latest win slipped out of them.

“I don’t want the Ravens to be known as the team that gets up big and blows the lead,” Hamilton said. “It’s not who we are, and we have to prove that to everybody else.”

The Ravens’ work is cut out for them. The last few years, they’ve been doing a hell of a job proving the opposite.