Can’t anybody stop this orange madness?

Jacksonville’s field goal that beat the Broncos, 26-24, on the last play of the game Sunday afternoon felt like a kick to a gut, so painful it knocked the wind out of Denver fans too hurt to even boo their winless team.

With four losses in four games the Broncos haven’t started so slow or sunk so low since 1999. Nobody knows the bottom for this team, but we have arrived at the point that the lone way to stay sane is to start counting the weeks until this wretched NFL season is over.

“I ain’t saying nothing. Thirteen more weeks for me,” cornerback Chris Harris Jr. said, as he walked toward the locker room exit after another heartbreaking defeat for a proud franchise that has forgotten how to win.

The contract of Harris, among the few stalwarts remaining from the dominant defense that carried the Broncos to victory at Super Bowl 50, expires with the final play of this lost season, giving him the opportunity to find a new employer, if he so chooses.

So count Harris as a lucky one. As for the rest of us in Broncos Country?

We’re stuck with this mess.

“We all down and it (stinks) and it’s sad,” said Broncos safety Will Parks, who vowed to keep fighting with his football brothers.

Since their Super Bowl victory celebration in downtown Denver less than four years ago, the Broncos’ record is 20-32. How to stop this orange madness?

I say: Fire ’em all.

Wasn’t new coach Vic Fangio advertised as an evil defensive genius? Well, somehow Uncle Vic has turned Frankenstein’s monster into Little Bo Peep’s sheep.

The defense formerly known as the Orange Crush has been powerless on Empower Field at Mile High, losing both home games in 2019 with the head-scratching inability to stop Chicago and Jacksonville on the final drives of the fourth quarter by quarterbacks named Mitch Trubisky and Gardner Minshew, whom nobody confuses with Montana and Manning.

The truth is Jacksonville kicked the Donkey’s rump up and down the field, with running back Leonard Fournette rumbling for 225 yards on the ground.

“I’ve never had a running back go off like that on us. It makes me sick,” veteran defensive lineman Derek Wolfe said.

Fair or not, Fangio and quarterback Joe Flacco will take the hardest hits in the short term for this team’s failures. It’s hard to imagine how either this lovable 61-year-old coach or his 34-year-old quarterback can survive long enough to see this rebuilding project through completion.

Quite frankly, it’s hard to make an argument why Flacco should be the starting quarterback after the injured thumb of rookie Drew Lock heals and the second-round draft choice from Missouri is eligible to come off injured reserve and play Nov. 3 against Cleveland.

“You can’t go back in time and fix this thing or fix that thing,” said Flacco. “It is what it is.”

And what it is stinks. Flacco’s interception late in the second quarter killed a chance for Denver to put the game out of reach with the Broncos leading by 14 points. His eight-yard touchdown pass to Courtland Sutton with one minute, 32 seconds remaining in the fourth quarter gave the Broncos a 24-23 lead, but left too many ticks on the clock for Minshew, who became the hero.

John Elway is the most beloved sports icon in Colorado history. He won two championships as a quarterback and claimed another Lombardi Trophy as the roster’s architect. Since 1983, the unofficial motto of Broncos Country has been: In Elway We Trust.

Broncomaniacs, however, are losing faith in Elway. Or, as disgruntled fan Todd Rogers, who watched in dismay on television from his home in Indiana, reached out to tell me: “I love No. 7 as a quarterback. But as a general manager, it’s ‘In Elway We Rust.’”

Fangio, Flacco and Elway are all sizzling on the hot seat. And how long before the first veteran requests a trade?

At 6:44 p.m., in a locker room empty except for linebacker Von Miller and a horde of journalists awaiting his explanation for how it all could go so wrong so quickly for the Broncos, the Vonster pulled on a black cowboy hat, then turned and faced the cameras aimed at him from point-blank range.

“There’s no way out,” Miller said. “The only way is up.”

The Broncos have sunk so low and everything is so dark that all anybody in Broncos Country can do now is dream. There are only 207 days remaining to the next NFL draft, when the rebuilding of this team can begin in earnest.

The question is: Does Elway, who hates to lose, have the appetite for that slow, difficult and painful task?