The wave went round and round the stadium, as another sad NFL season in Denver swirled down the tubes.

Wave goodbye. It’s time for coach Vance Joseph to go, along with too many veteran players to count and any delusion this franchise might have of being a championship contender.

Under Joseph’s misdirection, what now qualifies as improvement for Denver is ending 2018 with four consecutive losses to finish 6-10, one lousy victory better than a year ago.

“By the Broncos’ standard,” said Joseph, it’s “not good enough.”

While insisting general manager John Elway had offered him no word on his fate, Joseph spoke calmly and took blame graciously after Sunday’s loss to the Chargers, like a condemned coach who realizes all he can save now is his dignity.

“When you’re losing, everybody gets fired,” Broncos defensive end Derek Wolfe said. “That’s just the way it goes.”

Know what’s really sad, sadder than the sight of receiver Emmanuel Sanders pushing himself and his torn Achilles on a scooter outside the locker room or linebacker Brandon Marshall packing his bags, likely for the final time as a member of a proud defense?

In a span of three short years, Denver has gone from Super Bowl champion to the only thing worse than being a bad football team. The Broncos are boring. And not a little boring. Bigly boring.

As darkness crept across the horizon, the Broncos were well on their way to losing 23-9. When quarterback Case Keenum broke the Denver huddle late in the third quarter, a crowd of die-hard Broncomaniacs, long past the anger stage of grief, chose to entertain themselves rather than boo the inept offense on the field.

So round and round the stadium, section by section, bored spectators stood to do the wave. Disappointed fan Melissa Cosyns sat uneasily in Section 110, giving them all dirty looks.

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The sorry sideshow the Broncos have become is painful to a city whose heart is so wrapped up in football. As the wave circled the stadium, its passion deflated by 12,073 no-shows at kickoff and further diminished with each Denver punt, one thought refused to budge from my mind:

Can you imagine how angry Peyton Manning would be, his face burning red-hot with aggravation, if Broncos fans had done the wave while he was trying to do work in his home stadium?

Newsflash: Manning doesn’t work here anymore. And the Broncos are not a playoff contender. Not even close.

While Elway has stubbornly refused to admit reality, the window of opportunity to compete for the Super Bowl has not only closed on the Broncos, it has been slammed hard on the fingers throughout the Denver locker room.

“At the end of the day, we’re rebuilding,” Wolfe said.

With a humble dose of self-deprecation, Wolfe casts himself as the stereotypical, over-amped mauler, howling mad at the world from his first step out of bed in the morning to his next vicious sack of an opposing quarterback. So it is especially sobering to hear Wolfe analytically tell the truth about where the Broncos are now.

“We won a Super Bowl,” Wolfe said. “We lost some guys, guys got old and guys had to move on. So we’re rebuilding right now. That’s just the hard facts. When you lose a guy like Peyton Manning, that’s a huge hit to a locker room. Identity-wise, you have figure out what kind of team you’re going to be, because he kind of sets the pace for that. That’s why they call him the Sheriff. This last couple years, we’ve been trying to figure it out.”

Yes, it’s hard to accept, especially in a city where playoff football is considered as much a birthright as the snow-capped Rockies glistening in the January sun.

Well, wave goodbye to all that.

The mighty Broncos have fallen. We can only hope the pride and haughtiness of Elway also slipped during this franchise’s first back-to-back losing seasons since 1972.

Because what’s next is far harder than firing Joseph. He’s merely a scapegoat that must be sacrificed for the sins of a business slowly beset by all the nearly inevitable problems experienced when an owner as strong as Pat Bowlen begins to fade, succumbing to poor health.

I will repeat: An heir to Mr. B’s big chair needs to be declared in 2019, or the bickering Bowlens should sell the team.

Purge veterans, search for a young quarterback and let the extreme makeover begin, with the coming year and perhaps 2020 even more painful than all the frustration Denver has endured during in the past three seasons.

What awaits the Broncos is the long climb back to respectability, as difficult and fraught with potential missteps as scaling Longs Peak.