Paul Edinger was standing in line for a Harry Potter ride at Universal Studios in Florida earlier this month when his phone buzzed with a call from a 313 number he didn’t recognize.

Edinger, who has spent little time in the state of Michigan since his college career ended 20 years ago, let the call go to voicemail, but he thought it was unusual enough that he showed a friend in line with him — a Michigan native whose daughter had just finished a chorus event with Edinger’s 10-year-old girl.

When Edinger checked the voicemail a few minutes later and shared the message with his friend — a reporter was trying to contact the former Michigan State kicker about the field goal he made against the Detroit Lions during his rookie season with the Chicago Bears — he was met with quizzical disbelief.

“I can’t believe that was you,” Edinger’s friend said. “You ruined it for us.”

Edinger’s 54-yard line drive with 2 seconds left in a Christmas Eve game at the Pontiac Silverdome sent the Bears to a 23-20 upset of the Lions on the final Sunday of the 2000 regular season.

The kick knocked the Lions out of the playoffs and ushered in one of the most disastrous eras in NFL history, an era that Edinger said he still gets blamed for a handful of times a year.

The Lions hired Matt Millen as general manager two weeks later, fired Gary Moeller as interim coach and won just 31 games over the next eight seasons, the worst eight-year stretch in modern NFL history.

In the 19 years since Edinger’s kick sailed through the uprights, the Lions have made the playoffs just three times and failed to win a single postseason game.

SCOUTING COMBINE:Moving to prime time; event will remain in Indianapolis through 2021

POST MALONE:First Romo then Prescott: How Cowboys QB cracked hit song

Their drought without a playoff victory now stands at 10,000 days, since a Jan. 5, 1992, win over the Dallas Cowboys.

It’s the second longest active streak in the NFL behind the Cincinnati Bengals, whose last playoff win came a season earlier, on Jan. 6, 1991. And in tracing its origins, it’s the product of a handful of interconnected events like Edinger’s field goal, Barry Sanders’ abrupt retirement and the karmic penalty flag that wasn’t in the 2015 playoffs.

'One player away'

When the Lions met the Cowboys in the division round of the 1992 playoffs, it was considered a clash of two of the NFL’s rising powers.

The Cowboys were just beginning to reap the rewards of the Herschel Walker trade with Troy Aikman at quarterback (though Steve Beuerlein started that playoff game), Emmitt Smith at running back and Michael Irvin at wide receiver, and the Lions had Sanders and Herman Moore on offense, the makings of a good offensive line and a young nucleus on defense led by Pro Bowlers Jerry Ball, Bennie Blades and Chris Spielman.

The Lions beat the Cowboys handily in the middle of the 1991 regular season, and they dominated the playoff rematch at the Silverdome, 38-6. Erik Kramer opened the scoring with a 31-yard touchdown pass to Willie Green early in the first quarter, Barry Sanders closed it with a 47-yard touchdown run late in the fourth, and the Lions celebrated by dousing then-head coach Wayne Fontes with Gatorade on the field.

Fontes implored his team after a blowout loss to Washington early in the season to look around the RFK Stadium locker room and remember the feeling because they’d be back for a playoff game, and sure enough the Lions faced Washington again for the right to go to the Super Bowl.

The game wasn’t particularly close. Washington won, 41-10. But the Lions trailed by only a touchdown at halftime and let the game slip away with a rough third quarter. Washington scored points on three of its first four possessions in the second half (and missed a field goal on its fourth), while the Lions had a field goal blocked and threw an interception that was returned for a touchdown.

Still, the Lions left the season feeling good about their chances to sustain playoff success, and even now players look back and wonder what could have been.

In 1992, the Lions won just five games and finished last in the division. In 1993, they won the NFC Central Division but lost a wildcard game to the Green Bay Packers when Sterling Sharpe ran free behind William White and Kevin Scott to catch a 40-yard touchdown pass wide open in the back of the end zone.

The Lions made the playoffs as a wildcard again the next two years, but ran into superior teams both times. By 1996, age and free agency had started to decimate the roster, and Fontes was fired after a 5-11 season.

“If you keep that nucleus together, there’s no telling how far we would have pushed the envelope because that same Dallas Cowboys team that we annihilated that game (in the playoffs), what happened in ‘93? In ‘93 they win the Super Bowl,” Blades said in 2016. “In ’94, they win the Super Bowl. You always say, ‘OK, how’d the team that we annihilate, (how’d) they get it right?’ They keep the core and they add what they need.”

The Lions lost starting guards Mike Utley and Eric Andolsek during and after the 1991 season, Utley to a paralyzing injury that ended his career and Andolsek to a tragic death when he was hit by a truck while working in his yard. Fontes said the death of his brother, Len, to a heart attack in May 1992 was another contributing factor to the team’s inability to build off that ’91 season, and core players Ball, Spielman and Lomas Brown were gone by the time the 1996 season rolled around.

“Our group had a shot,” Fontes told me a few years ago. “We had a chance to win it all, and I really believe this in my heart, had we not lost my brother, Utley and Andolsek, and the year we went to the championship game I think we lost six great players, we’d have had a chance to go to the Super Bowl. We were one player away. One away. And we’d have won two or three Super Bowls.”

Barry bolts

When Fontes was fired as both the winningest and losingest coach in franchise history, the Lions replaced him with a decidedly different personality as head coach, Bobby Ross, in 1997.

While Fontes was known for his easygoing nature, Ross was a disciplinarian who came to the Lions with a track record of success. He never had a losing season in his five years as San Diego Chargers coach and took that organization to the Super Bowl in 1995.

In Detroit, the Lions earned a wildcard berth in Ross’ first season as coach, when Sanders rushed for a franchise-record 2,053 yards. A year later, the Lions regressed to 5-11 and Sanders matched a career low at 4.3 yards per carry.

Sanders retired abruptly just before the 1999 season, and many have pointed to Ross’ presence as a reason why. William Sanders, Barry’s father, was critical of both Ross and then-offensive coordinator Sylvester Croom months before his son’s retirement, though Barry himself has disputed that Ross was a factor in his decision.

Whatever the reason, when Sanders left the team on the eve of training camp that summer, it sent the organization into a frightening tailspin.

The Lions, with Gus Frerotte and Charlie Batch splitting quarterback duties and Greg Hill as their leading rusher, somehow went 8-8 that season and made the playoffs as a wildcard after losing their final four games of the regular season.

They got trucked by old nemesis Washington again in the playoffs, 27-13, then experienced more tumult in 2000. Ross resigned midway through the season, Gary Moeller took over as head coach, and the Lions entered their Week 17 game against the Chicago Bears in need of a win to reach the postseason.

Jason Hanson tied the game on a 26-yard field goal with two minutes to play, then the Lions watched helplessly as Edinger blasted the game-winner and a kick he still regards as “one of the most memorable” of his career for “what it did just to effect the two teams and then the Lions era moving forward.”

“I guess when they made the field goal that was Mr. Ford’s breaking point with us,” said Larry Lee, a Lions executive in the ‘90s who was let go in the purge after Edinger’s kick. “I think if he (misses) that field goal we stick around and no Millen, eventually, and that kind of thing. So yeah, that field goal meant a lot to a lot of us.”

The Millen years

There’s not much to say about Millen’s tenure as general manager that you don’t know already. Quite simply, it was one of the darkest periods any team has experienced in NFL history, and after being competitive for most of the ‘90s, it’s the biggest reason why the Lions are at 10,000 days and counting today.

In Millen’s seven-plus seasons as GM, from 2001 until he was fired three games into the 2008 season, the Lions never once had a winning record and never finished higher than third place in their own (mostly four-team) division.

The Lions had top-10 draft picks every year from 2002-07, and they spent most of that time chasing one mistake after another. Joey Harrington. Charles Rogers. Roy Williams. Mike Williams. Ernie Sims. And finally, success in the form of the greatest receiver in franchise history, Calvin Johnson.

Among the future Hall of Famers the Lions passed on during those years: Andre Johnson, Ben Roethlisberger and DeMarcus Ware, who Millen actually had on the phone before having a last-minute change of heart and selecting a first-round receiver (Mike Williams) for the third straight draft.

A four-time Super Bowl champion as a player, Millen actually turned down several overtures to join the Lions before leaving the broadcast booth for the front office in 2001. He detailed the Lions’ pursuit of him in a 2013 interview about William Clay Ford’s 50th anniversary of buying the team.

Millen has admitted he was in over his head as general manager, and his mistakes left the team with a dreadful roster that took years to rebuild.

In 2008, the Lions became the first team to go 0-16 in NFL history, when they had a minus-249 point differential for the entire season.

Millen wasn’t around to see the end of that year, but he left the organization with a parting gift that could one day be the reason the Lions’ playoff winless streak ends — or, depending on your point of view, is perhaps a contributing factor to why it’s continued.

In the 2009 draft, the Lions, led by Millen’s replacement and his former top lieutenant, Martin Mayhew, took quarterback Matthew Stafford with the No. 1 overall pick. Stafford, entering Year 11 this fall, holds every Lions passing record imaginable but is 0-3 in the playoffs.

Flag football

The Lions are 0-9 in the playoffs since that 1992 win over the Cowboys. Of the 122 other teams in the four major American professional sports, the Bengals and Washington Nationals (formerly the Montreal Expos) are the only ones not to win a playoff game or series, in the case of baseball, basketball and hockey, in that span.

But if not for those pesky Cowboys, the Lions’ drought would have ended 1,600 days ago.

On Jan. 4, 2015, the Lions lost a wildcard game to the Cowboys in controversial fashion when officials threw and then picked up a penalty flag midway through the fourth quarter.

The Cowboys chipped away at the Lions' 17-7 lead, first with a DeMarco Murray 1-yard touchdown run, then with a Dan Bailey 51-yard field goal, and they trailed just 20-17 when Stafford threw incomplete to Brandon Pettigrew on third-and-1 from the Dallas 46 with 8:25 to play.

Back judge Lee Dyer called Cowboys linebacker Anthony Hitchens for pass interference, but head linesman Jerry Bergman overturned the call insisting he had a better angle on the play.

The Lions punted on fourth down, a shank of a kick that went just 10 yards, and the Cowboys followed with the game-winning touchdown drive, converting a fourth-and-6 and two third-and-longs.

“Just another missed call, missed opportunity where referees, I don’t really know what they’re looking at sometimes,” Bush said earlier this year.

The overturned penalty isn’t why the Lions lost that game — they fumbled twice in the final 2:10 with an opportunity to drive and tie or take the lead — and it’s not why the streak of sorrow has reached 10,000 days.

Taken collectively, though, that flag, plus Edinger’s kick, plus Millen’s hire, plus Sharpe’s catch, plus Sanders’ surprise retirement — plus dozens of other moments big and small — help explain why the Lions’ marathon of misery is still going strong today.

Follow Dave Birkett on Twitter @davebirkett