Byner helps Jets reserve confront past mistake

EARNEST Byner had been to hell and back once, and 27 long years after a moment in time forever remembered as The Fumble, he recognized his calling was to help a lost, young, wounded kindred spirit recover from his own worst nightmare.

Brandon Bostick is a reserve tight end for the Jets these days. Bostick was the one who, as a Packer, muffed a fateful onside kick in Seattle in the 2014 NFC Championship game that cost Green Bay a berth in Super Bowl XLIX. Now he has to face the Seahawks again come Sunday at MetLife.

“I haven’t thought about it the whole season ’til you actually said something about it,” Bostick said, and laughed.

He has begun to rebuild his career after it crumbled not long after that day — a credit to him, of course, but as well to Byner, who felt compelled to be a guardian angel at a time when Bostick had no idea what was lurking on the horizon — the loneliness ... the emptiness ... even death threats.

“Because I recognized the pain in his voice ... the pain that he felt about letting people down, or how he was blaming the whole game on himself,” Byner told The Post by phone. “I saw that. I recognized that pain right away, and my heart said I had to reach out to him.”

Byner reached out to Packers running backs coach Sam Gash, who served as the intermediary, and connected with Bostick at his Florence, S.C., home several days after the worst football day of his life.

“I had no idea who he was, so I had to look him up, Google him,” said Bostick, who was born in 1989. “So it finally made sense why he was calling me. I definitely remember he was just saying how things are gonna be, and just how to handle it, and how to move on from it and how to, I guess, re-find myself again, gain my focus back in football and just helped me get my confidence back in myself.”

Byner told him: “Yes, your mistake cost the game. But it wasn’t the only mistake that cost the game.”

During that initial 30-minute conversation, which preceded many others, they were able to laugh about Bostick not even being born the day Byner fumbled away the tying touchdown — and a berth in Super Bowl XXII — at the 1-yard line in Denver.

“He understood that I understood what he was going through,” Byner said.

Did Byner ever understand. Strangers would yell “fumble” at him when he would do appearances.

“The haunting for me was people reminding me of my mistake,” Byner said. “And then sometimes, there would be some obscene things that they would say. We did a USO trip over to Germany. I almost had to fight a guy.”

Byner was fortunate only in this regard: He didn’t have to endure any angry mob on social media.

“[Bostick] was inundated right away,” Byner said. “The pressure of that was instant. For me, it built up over time.

“But the low point to me, really, finally came after I had been traded [in 1989] to the Redskins, and I had muffed a pass in the end zone and we lost the game because of that pass. That’s when I hit rock bottom. I looked up at the moon and the stars and I’m like, ‘Why me? Why me?’” Why was that rock bottom? “Because it had happened again, it had come back,” Byner said. “The Fumble was revisited.”

Bostick avoided television and social media for a week or so then confronted his demons head on. He even watched the replay of his muff. “I used it as motivation,” Bostick said. The death threats didn’t rattle him. “Earnest already told me what to expect, so I knew what was coming,” Bostick said.

Even so, the Packers cut him, and he didn’t yet believe in himself with the Vikings in 2015. The Jets signed him to the practice squad at the end of last season.

“You gotta be accountable,” Bostick said. “People are counting on you. You can’t take anything for granted. You gotta be on your Ps and Qs at all times. You gotta be locked in. You gotta do your job most importantly, and just do what your asked to do, you’ll be all right.”

He last spoke with Byner in the preseason. Asked what he had learned about dealing with failure, Bostick said, “I don’t think anything can faze me mentally after going through that. You just gotta move on from stuff, don’t let stuff hold you back, and always believe in yourself.”

And he is comforted that the Jets believe in him.

“I’m on the ‘hands’ team,” Bostick said with a laugh, “so obviously they think I can catch the ball.”