CLEVELAND — Despite a poor showing from almost every corner of the roster, the Ravens were up one point in the final minutes against the Cleveland Browns with an opportunity to put the game away.

All they needed was for safety Kyle Hamilton to catch the ball.

The young Pro Bowl safety has talked extensively about the secondary’s need to finish interceptions. He and his teammates worked on their hands at practice. When kickoff arrived, Hamilton played fast and physically and almost won two 50-50 balls. He made 10 tackles with a strip sack and two pass defenses.

But, with the game on the line, he reached out, grasped the ball with both hands, bobbled it and then lost it. And then the Ravens lost the game 29-24.

Hamilton was responsible for the worst drop, but safety Eddie Jackson was responsible for the most.

He dropped one in the end zone. He let a deep ball fly through his hands. He missed another interception while running into safety Ar’Darius Washington, who might have gotten there.

Maybe the Ravens would have found a way to lose no matter what. Or maybe, if they had made just one interception, the locker room would have been filled with smiles and laughter instead of somber silence.

The inability to catch has been a story all season, though it was at its worst in this game. The Ravens have made five interceptions this season. One was by a linebacker, Roquan Smith. The rest were by Marlon Humphrey, who didn’t play, although he has dropped an interception as well.

It’s an epidemic that’s a bit befuddling considering catching is a basic skill for NFL players, especially in skill positions, to have.

“I mean, you can get on the JUGS [passing machine], but at the end of the day, we can all catch, you know what I’m saying?” Washington said. “So just block out all the noise, stop thinking about what’s going on and just focus on catching the ball.”

The solution is as “simple as that,” Jackson said.

“We just got to make them [those plays],” Jackson said. “There’s no theory behind it. We’re just in a funk right now. We got to get out of it. Because a lot of those are big, game-changing plays if we make those.”

The secondary’s lack of hands was the most prominent issue, but its struggles go deeper. There have been communication breakdowns based on the body language of the players as they wave their arms and yell at each other. It’s something players have mentioned in locker room interviews over the season.

As a result, they’ve allowed quarterbacks to pass for 2,331 net yards, the most by any team in the league. That’s an average of 291 yards per game, and four quarterbacks have passed for over 300 yards against them. Two, Baker Mayfield and Jameis Winston, are not considered top-tier quarterbacks in the league.

Jackson said communication issues still popped up “here and there,” although that wasn’t the main thing in this game. Cornerback Brandon Stephens said the same, adding that the problem is execution at this point.

That was in spite of a shake-up in the secondary. Some of it was forced, with Humphrey out with a knee injury and cornerback Nate Wiggins out with an illness. Some of it was a choice — the Ravens replaced starting safety Marcus Williams with Washington, and coach John Harbaugh said after the game it did not have to do with Williams’ health.

“It was a personnel decision,” Harbaugh said. “We’re kind of working through some things there. I feel very confident Marcus is going to be out there playing great football the rest of the season. I’ll just talk about it being an internal type of situation.”

As a result, the Ravens had to give cornerbacks Arthur Maulet and Jalyn Armour-Davis a significant amount of playing time in their first game back from injury. Maulet had said he wanted to help the team with communication. He declined an interview after the game, as did Hamilton, who did not make himself available.

What makes it all the more frustrating is that these players know they’re better than this. They have two Pro Bowlers in Humphrey and Hamilton. They’ve got Williams, who was at one point the highest-paid safety in the league, and Stephens, who had a breakout season last year. They’ve got seasoned veterans in Maulet and Jackson and young potential in Wiggins.

The secondary is the worst of the problems, but the entire defense isn’t playing up to what defensive tackle Nnamdi Madubuike said is the Ravens’ standard. Ahead of the Week 6 win over the Washington Commanders, Harbaugh said he told the group: “We were the 29th-ranked pass defense by statistics in the league — ‘Are we going to play 29th the rest of the year?’ That’s an opportunity, because we know we’re far better than that — we’re much more talented than that and we can play so much better.”

Two weeks later, there are still nine games to go, but the pressure is on. They can’t change the past — although Washington said it’s possible they’d be undefeated if the defense had held up its end — and Jackson said they need to take this one on the chin (“it sucks”) and move on. They need to figure out how to play to the Ravens’ standard.

“We’re in the middle of the season right now, and so we’ve got to get back to doing what we do,” Washington said. “It’s kind of like an urgency right now, but just stay calm and everything like that. But it’s definitely urgent.”

And they need to put in even more work on the JUGS.