He was 41 yards from the end zone last Sunday, with a millisecond on the clock, waving his field-goal kicker off the field.

"No! No! No!" Doug Flutie was heard to say.

He wanted to try the Hail Mary play. He always wants that play. It's his play. It's his. He didn't invent the play, but he put it on the map 17 years ago in a Miami drizzle, and he still thinks it's money.

It's like his halfcourt shot in basketball. Doug Flutie once won a game in high school with a rainbow from midcourt. He still plays pickup basketball almost every Monday, after his San Diego Charger practices, and he always stands at halfcourt before he leaves, hoisting his favorite shot.

"You should at least hit the rim from halfcourt," Flutie says. "If it goes in, that's lucky. But there's no excuse not to be able to hit the rim."

And so this is why you want him on your team. This is why he remains the most charming person in football. He is 5-foot-nothing, and weighs 170-nothing, and, yet, if I had been the San Diego Chargers' head coach last Sunday in Foxboro, I'd have done what he said.

But unfortunately -- with the score tied and a tick left -- they went for the field goal instead of the Hail Mary. And the moral of this story is that they'll learn. Wade Richey's kick, from 59 yards, was short (although just barely), and the Chargers ended up doing what Doug Flutie tends not to do: they lost.

And now that his Chargers have dropped two straight -- and are no longer perceived as the darlings of this early season -- trust me when I say: Flutie has us right where he wants us.

The Denver Broncos are next on the schedule, and it'll be San Diego's first survival game of the year, and this is the time you want a quarterback who's his most chipper when it's 4th and 40.

This is the time you want a quarterback who has run half a Boston Marathon, and who's shot around with the Celtics and slap-shotted with the Bruins, and taken BP with the Padres and played drums with the Dave Matthews Band. This is the time you want a quarterback who's done a triathlon on a whim, and who's already won an ESPY in practice, and who could've been a starting point guard at Boston College.

This is the kind of quarterback who's at his best when things are at their God-awful worst. Who is better not as a frontrunner, but when he's on the backburner.

Put it this way. The Chargers might be the first team in history that went 1-15 one year, and were then expected to win their first five games the next year (against Washington, Dallas, Cincinnati, Cleveland and New England). Well, it was way too much to ask. And they've given two of those five games back.

But now they'll be the underdogs again, and every one will discount them again, and Jay Leno may tell jokes about them again, but they have just the man to turn to.

And he's short. He's 38 and short.

You have to have been in the Chargers locker room these days to understand the charisma of Douglas Richard Flutie. They talk about how hard he used to be to tackle ("I hated that guy when he was in Buffalo!" DT John Parrella says), and they talk about how he is in the huddle. How he tells them, "Come on, let's do this."

"And I tell you what," says fullback Fred McCrary, "our plays take so long to say, it's amazing he has time to tell us anything else at all."

They see him running three 6-minute, 20-second miles after practice and he inspires them. They see him fade back to pass in practice, fall on his rump, and then get up and hit receiver Curtis Conway in stride. And they're amazed by him.

"That play, had it been in a game, would have won an ESPY," says cornerback Ryan McNeil.

But they don't know the half of it. They don't know that when Flutie was at Boston College, the Eagles basketball coach, Gary Williams, wanted to start him at point.

"Well," says Flutie, "I had left in the spring of my senior year to go to the USFL and came back in the fall to finish up school. And I would've been the starting point guard my fifth year because I had one more year. Gary wanted me to come out. Michael Adams was gone, and [he] had a freshman coming in by the name of Dana Barros. But he didn't know Dana was Dana yet. And so he needed some leadership and a senior-type guy. And I had been playing pickup ball with the team for four years anyway, so I knew all the guys and had played with them. So I was going to do that.

"But then Donald Trump kind of vetoed it because I was under contract. At first he said go ahead, do it, knock yourself out. And then he kind of had second thoughts about it, didn't want me to get hurt. But I was a penetrator. I'd drive, penetrate and dish. Eric Moulds always says I was a John Stockton. Stockton's from my generation, so I'll take that comparison."

No, they don't know the half of it. They don't know the bitter-cold temperatures Flutie used to see in Canada, when he was regularly winning Grey Cups in the CFL. "My coldest game up there? It was minus-24 at kickoff, minus-44 by the end of the game, minus-85 wind chill. With six inches of snow, and 35-mile-an-hour winds.

"I had 200 yards passing at halftime. But in the second half, the heaters broke. Well, they didn't actually break. They turned the heaters off at halftime, because they took an extended halftime to plow the field, and the propane thickened up, and wouldn't go through the heaters, so they shut down. And we were a passing team ... By the end of the game, people couldn't run."

No, they don't know know the half of it. They don't know that Flutie was asked to promote a triathlon in San Francisco last spring, around minicamp, and that his contract called for him to participate. He thought, from talking to his agent, that it meant he was supposed to swim a little bit and then just get out and take a PR photo. And that he was supposed to bike a little bit and take another PR photo. And then run a little bit and take another PR photo. But once he arrived, he found out the organizers expected him to do the race. The whole triathlon!

So he did it. A mile-and-a-half swim, an 18-mile bike, an 8-mile run.

"I hadn't done any distance running for three or four weeks before it, because the last distance running I'd done had been for the Boston Marathon," Flutie says. "But I finished it in about 3:19, and finished in the middle of the pack for the average Joe's, and felt pretty good about it. But if I'm going to do something, I like to train for it.

"But I was irritated because I honestly felt like they wanted to take a high-profile athlete, bring him in and show he couldn't do it. To show how tough a triathlon is. Because they are phenomenal athletes. But, still, I wanted to finish it."

So, no, they don't know the half of it. They don't know that every time Doug Flutie goes home to his new little house in La Jolla, he has an autistic son waiting for him. A 9-year-old autistic son, Dougie, who, according to Flutie, "doesn't speak at all, can't dress himself and can't use his fork."

Little Dougie Flutie will always need his parents' care -- even when he's an adult -- and Doug Flutie, the quarterback, is ready for that. Doug Flutie is not going anywhere. His Flutie Flakes raise money to research autism, and Doug Flutie can recite all the ins and outs of autism. He is not going anywhere.

"Shoot, I wouldn't trade Dougie for anyone," he says. "Dougie has a smile on his face all the time, he's the happiest kid I know."

No, they don't know the half of it. And maybe the rest of the NFL doesn't either. Maybe the rest of the league doesn't know or respect the Flutie charm. If they did, it wouldn't have taken him this long -- 17 years -- to be an unquestioned starter for the first time in his NFL career.

Oh well, he's used to it, used to 4th and 40. The truth is, if the Chargers could've only converted a third-and-goal against Cleveland and a third-and-one against New England, they'd be 5-0 right now, and they'd be the talk of a fickle league.

Instead, they're 3-2, and have somewhat of a Hail Mary on their hands.

But, boy, do they have just the guy.

Tom Friend is a senior writer for ESPN The Magazine. E-mail him at tom.friend@espnmag.com.