The Harrington Family Foundation

BIRMINGHAM, Mich. -- The first to come over was an older guy in a red sweater. He had white hair and a neatly trimmed white beard and he got there before the Guinness did. He stuck out his hand and said, "I just want to say you deserved better. You really did."

Quietly, Joey Harrington said, "Thank you," and nodded.

Next was a young man, 20-something, who didn't want to interrupt but just wanted to say it made him mad every time he saw Jeff Garcia starting at quarterback for the Detroit Lions.

Then it was a semi-drunk businessman in a sharp suit, turning to tell Harrington how well he'd handled the situation. Then it was a woman, flustered at first before gathering herself enough to ask The Question.

"Are you going to be back next year?" she asked.

"What do you think I should do?" Harrington asked.

Apologetically, and she said it was apologetically because she grew up in Michigan, she said, "You should get out of here."

A few hours earlier, Harrington's coach, Dick Jauron, the Detroit Lions' interim coach, had reinstalled Harrington as the team's starting quarterback for today's game in San Antonio against the New Orleans Saints.

In the context of the season, it made all the sense in the world. In Harrington's fourth NFL season, nothing has gone as planned. Every time he's thought he had something figured out, it's changed.

The season began with talk of playoffs or bust, of a division title. It's ending as a mockery of everything the NFL and its drive to parity stands for.

Fans have booed. Harrington left the field this year to a roaring chant of "Joey sucks!" He walked out to the parking lot to find a guy with a megaphone yelling at him. A few games later, when Garcia was in and struggling, fans were chanting for Harrington to be put back in.

Now, the Lions are 4-10 and about to play their fourth game since Steve Mariucci was fired as coach. At this point, a win is likely only because they are playing a team that's a bigger mess than the Lions, but the Saints have had to deal with a natural disaster. The Lions have had only to deal with being the Lions.

For the second time this season, Harrington is going to replace the guy (Garcia) who replaced him in the lineup, with that guy dropping to the No. 3 job this week.

This after Harrington was certain he wasn't going to play again this season. There is still the real possibility that he's playing his final two games with the Lions, the team that drafted him third overall in 2002. If this is it, he'll leave having accomplished nothing that he set out to do.

If he's gone, he'll leave having taken the brunt of fan abuse and, lately, a lot of sympathetic well wishes. All of which makes sense only in the context of decades of losing and frustration and a franchise now on the edge of absurdity.

It's an interesting question, then, that Harrington faces shortly after leaving dinner at an Irish pub in trendy downtown Birmingham, back in his house on a street that looks like a wealthier Main Street U.S.A.

So, Joey Harrington. How are you doing?

"Tired," he said. He paused.

"Frustrated," he said. He paused.

"But," he said. He paused.

"But still very," he said. He paused. Determined?

"Yeah, that's a good word," he said. He paused. "It's been an interesting year. It's been an interesting four years."

THE HAZE OF DEFEAT

Losing is like the smoke in a bar. It's everywhere, permeates everything. It sticks to you. You carry it home. Harrington's been fighting that since the day he arrived. It's never been easy. This year it's been near impossible.

He's gone from the hope of the preseason, "to frustrated, to burning at the stake and people wanting you on the first thing smoking out of town, to people chanting for you to come back on the field," he said.

So, how is he?

"I'm confused, but still very focused."

Mariucci was fired a few days after an embarrassing loss to Atlanta on Thanksgiving Day. The day the dismissal was announced, Lions cornerback Dre' Bly went on the NFL Network and talked to a Detroit Free Press reporter and said the same thing to each: Mariucci's firing was the fault of one person: Harrington.

If Harrington has indeed become at least a somewhat sympathetic figure around Detroit, that moment probably was the tipping point. Rather than fire back, Harrington took the high road. He wanted to grab a microphone and scream back, he said. Instead, he chose to not do something he'd regret.

"I shouldn't have to stand up and tell people why what he said was wrong," Harrington said. "If you can't see it, for whatever reason, then I don't care if you don't."

Jauron was installed as the interim coach, and he placed Garcia in the starting role. Perhaps the 0-3 record that followed helped reinforce that it was more than just the quarterback position plaguing the team.

Last week, when the Lions took the field for the last time at home, Harrington said probably 25 percent of the Ford Field crowd was dressed in Cincinnati orange. That was embarrassing, he said, more so than the angry fan march a local sports talk radio station sponsored before the game.

In the fourth quarter, with the Bengals way ahead, Harrington was brought into the game. He was 6 of 7 for 77 yards and a touchdown. He was told Tuesday he would start.

"It was time to make the move," Jauron told reporters Wednesday. "We're just seeing if we can jump-start ourselves and get a win somehow."

LOOKING BACK; LOOKING AHEAD

Years ago, Harrington got his first win in the league against the Saints. The ball sits in his basement -- surrounded by other game balls and sports memorabilia.

He's learned a lot since that game. There are, he said, things he could have said and done differently. Certainly he wishes he had played better. He's had some good games -- even some this season. But his passer rating is still 69.2, 31st of the 33 players who qualify.

Given everything he's gone through this year, all of the chaos, turmoil and controversy, all of the uncertainty, walking into that huddle last week wasn't easy. Bly said what he said a few weeks ago, but others in the locker room were thinking it. Another question, then. Where, right now, is Joey Harrington as a football player?

"I don't know," he said. "I really don't know. Because there are times when it feels easy. There are times when it feels like, you know, like it's really clicking."

"But there are times when it feels like a struggle."

Which brings him to today and kickoff at the Alamodome, where the biggest suspense might be how many fans show up at one of the Saints' two temporary homes to watch two of the worst teams in the league.

What happens?

"I play a football game," he said.