That first night I felt pretty lonely, to be honest. But the next couple of nights, I’ve just had so many things shared with me, I’ve just had the most overwhelming peaceful feeling that everything happens for a reason. It will all make sense later. – Jason Money

SPANISH FORK, Utah — Jason Money tried to revel in the joy he felt at his entire family being together for the first time in 18 months.

But the pain of a momentary mistake haunted him, muting the merriment of a night the entire family had anticipated for months.

“Everyone was happy, obviously, because we were all hanging out,” the 17-year-old said. “I wasn’t trying to bring the mood down at all, but I was tired. It was late. I’d played a football game, so I went downstairs, and I hit my knees and I just sobbed, I don’t know for like 30 minutes.”

Tears fell freely as he recounted the isolating heartbreak he felt as he struggled with the idea that he’d cost his teammates the chance at another game in a Spanish Fork uniform.

In his prayers, he begged for understanding, he pleaded for help.

“I was just asking why me,” he said, stopping to release a sob of emotion. “Being a competitor my whole life, there was a lot of grief. I was already feeling horrible; I was just trying to put all that sorrow and hate on the Savior.”

He stops to suck in a breath, then finishes.

“He really took it all,” he said. “That first night I felt pretty lonely, to be honest. But the next couple of nights, I’ve just had so many things shared with me, I’ve just had the most overwhelming peaceful feeling that everything happens for a reason. It will all make sense later.”

His parents and his sister fight their own tears as they listen to Jason talk about how a mistake on a football field broke his heart. And then, as he always does, he puts it in perspective.

“For this to be the saddest thing in my 17 years of life,” he smiles and his parents and sister, Jessica, burst into laughter. “It’s hard to recognize those things that soon. But I have now.”

* * *

Ken and Mina Money still can’t quite believe how one teenage boy’s mistake could become national news. They were nestled, as they always are, in the middle of families they’ve known for a decade as their sons started competing together in grade school. Their daughter, Lisa, was coming home from serving a mission in Spain just about the time the game was scheduled to end, so they quickly divided up duties and prepared to leave Provo High as quickly as they could.

They were gathering blankets and high-fiving other parents as they, like most at the game, believed that with about eight seconds on the game clock and a 14-11 lead, Spanish Fork had earned the fourth and final playoff spot from the region.

“We were down on the track, and we see one last play,” Ken Money said. “And then the whole Maple Mountain crowd was cheering. We had no clue what was going on. Then somebody told me they stripped the ball from Jason, and they’d scored. I saw Jason (on his knees in the end zone) and I just had to get to him.” What the Moneys didn’t see was that with 3.7 seconds left in the game, Jason had scrambled away from the line of scrimmage, successfully eluding Maple Mountain defensive players until the clock hit zero.

“I just didn’t want to get tackled with time left,” Jason said. “We were on their 20 and they could kick a field goal. I looked at the clock, and it was zero. And it was (he sighs) just relief. We just won. And all of a sudden, I was like, we didn’t just win.”

In football, the game doesn’t necessarily end when the clock hits zero. Instead, the game ends when the ball is dead, when the play is over. While Money and several other players stopped as the clock hit zero, two Maple Mountain defensive players did not.

Jason Blanthron stripped the ball from Money’s hand, after which Branddon Beebe picked it up and ran into the end zone for the game-winning touchdown.

Money said he realized his mistake the minute the defenders hit him.

“I realized I needed to go make a tackle,” he said. “Then I was surrounded by Maple Mountain kids celebrating, and I’m laying in the end zone just crushed. That’s any kid’s nightmare, anywhere. It’s a lot of hard work and three years of playing good football for that moment. It was overwhelming. It didn’t feel real at all.”

The crowd momentarily began chanting his name, but administrators quickly quieted the crowd. He wasn’t aware of much until he saw his father walking toward him.

“I was just heartbroken,” Jason said. “I couldn’t believe what happened. What was I thinking? If I could go back 10 seconds earlier, I would go down. If I could go back and re-do it. … It all happened so fast.”

His father approached him and he got to his feet.

“He didn’t really say anything,” Jason said, tears shining in his deep, brown eyes. “There wasn’t much to say.”

* * *

The only son of Ken and Mina Money, Jason’s world has always revolved around sports. While Ken played all three sports his son loves — football, baseball and basketball — Mina’s interest was more personal.

“I mostly just loved Jason,” she said, pointing out that all three of their daughters were cheerleaders at Spanish Fork. “When he was young, we just loved to watch everything. We didn’t care what he was doing.”

Ken Money wears his fatherly pride like a badge of honor, rattling off stats and accomplishments but without a hint of arrogance.

“Football has always been our favorite in our household,” he said. “He’s been a three-sport player as a sophomore, junior and senior. But football always kind of seemed to be where our attention usually went, camps and our effort and our time, mostly.”

Maybe, Ken points out, their commitment was cemented when Jason, as a sophomore quarterback, teamed up with his cousin, a senior, to lead Spanish Fork to the 3A state title game. They lost that game, but they set a record for touchdown completions.

“That kind of got the ball rolling,” he said. “He started getting some attention in recruiting, so we just started spending more time and effort.”

Ironically, it was the years of hard work that made what happened Tuesday night more painful. The fact that he has scholarship offers, while many of his teammates do not, only exacerbated his agony.

“There were so many emotions going on inside of me, I couldn’t talk between sobs,” he said. “It was a feeling I’ve never felt before in my entire life. Just a feeling like mixed emotions, a kind of sadness that has never hit me before. … This is a pretty unique loss. Even though we’re a team, it falls on my shoulders. I just felt for my team; I felt for everyone. We’ve all worked so hard for three years. … And for it to come to an end on my play, it really hurt me.”

* * *

Ken Money said the chaos was confusing, with people saying Jason was hot-dogging or that he’d spiked the ball. He knew that wasn’t true, but he knew he needed to get to his son as quickly as he could.

“Tried to deflect the pain for my son,” Ken said, tears in his eyes. “I could tell he was absolutely heartbroken. He’s a competitor, a fierce competitor. He’s started every game for three years as quarterback. He’s been there. He’s kind of made it happen, and they were pretty confident with the ball in his hands. He makes good decisions. It was just a fluke … there was some confusion and I just wanted to take the pain away.”

When he reached his son’s side, he knew there would be little he could do to ease this burden.

“There really wasn’t anything to say,” Ken said. “He knows sports better than I’ll ever know them. He knew what happened. So I just stood there with him.”

As Ken silently ushered his son to the car, a sobbing little boy in a Spanish Fork hoodie hit Jason on the leg.

“He was just always on the sideline,” the 6-foot-2 senior quarterback said, his eyes filling with tears remembering the sight of Kade Christensen. “He’s my buddy.”

“Jase looked at him, saw him, and then went down on his knees, hugged him,” Ken said, his voice cracking with emotion. “So they were just sitting there hugging. It was pretty cool. We kind of forgot about everything that was going on.”

But forgetting wouldn’t be an option for Money, his family, his teammates or the community. Less than 12 hours after that final play, it became a viral sensation, national news and fodder for Twitter trolls.

* * *

Within 30 minutes, Jason’s teammates were texting and tweeting their love and support of him. The next morning, Kade Christensen dropped off a letter and portrait of Money declaring him “the best quarterback in the world.”

Jason only attended his math class on Wednesday morning because the family planned to spend the day with his sister, Lisa, who’d been on an 18-month mission to Madrid, Spain, for the LDS Church.

Once he returned home, a personally painful situation became a public humiliation.

“I got a notification on my phone,” Jason said. “Someone tweeted at me and it said, ‘You worthless loser. You should never play football again.’ I had no clue who it was.”

The tweets continued, deteriorating from the rude and hurtful to horrific and unbelievable.

He texted his sister, Jessica Money, who is the cheer adviser at Spanish Fork. They learned that the video, already on YouTube, had been posted on most national sports websites and some news sites. It was the 1.2 million views on Bleacher Report that felt like a kick in the gut.

He texted his father.

“The very worst moment of my life, and 1.2 million people have seen it,” Ken Money said the text read. “Not many of us get stuck with the very worst moment of our lives out there.”

People called him insulting names and told him he wasn’t worthy of being the team’s water boy. He received 15 death threats, and one of the worst tweets, “You’re so stupid, you couldn’t even kill yourself right.”

It was shocking — for many reasons — to the entire family.

“Two hours before kickoff, he gets called into the principal’s office and (told) ‘You’re first-team academic all-state,’ ” Ken Money said, “10 players in the state.”

Why would people who didn’t know Money or care about the game possibly take the time to write him such vile sentiments?

Jessica Money admits she took to Twitter to defend her little brother, but quit after the trolls turned their venom on her.

But almost immediately after the insults began came the tweets of support. While Jason Money stayed off social media, his sister monitored it, and she said that very quickly, people from the community, starting with his teammates, began defending him.

Opponents and strangers from around the country quickly joined the fight to defend Money from those who inexplicably wanted to make a painful experience even more excruciating.

His coaches and teammates, those most affected by his mistake, were the first to offer support. Coach Kirk Chambers, who played in the NFL, offered a moving defense of the civic-minded honor student in a Blaze article.

Thursday night, Jason answered his phone to hear, “Hi, this is LaVell Edwards.”

“Gary Crowton (former BYU head coach and current SUU offensive coordinator) called him immediately,” Ken said. “Ty Detmer called him. … Dixie (where he has a scholarship offer) invited him down to visit the campus.”

Spanish Fork’s mayor and City Council members called to tell the family how well Jason had represented the community throughout his career.

Opposing players defended him on Twitter, with one Maple Mountain player even texting Jason two days after the game to invite him to a haunted house with some other teens.

“Unsolicited, they’ve just stepped up,” Ken said, tears returning to his eyes. “These guys have called him, they’ve reached out.”

Jason added, “Music producers with 500,000 followers are tweeting, ‘Hey man, we’ve got your back. Everyone makes mistakes.’ ”

And then, Saturday morning there came a call from an Arizona phone number.

“I answered, and he said, ‘Is this Jason Money?’ I said yes, and he said, ‘THE Jason Money?’ and I was like, ‘Yeah, uh-oh, I’m about to get some hate right now.’ He said, ‘Hey, man, this is Ryan Fitzpatrick. I just wanted you to know, I really think a lot of you. … I know you’re a great person and you shouldn’t let this define you.’ ”

Jason said every person who called or came to his house shared stories of their own failures, their own humiliations.

“It struck me that everyone has a story like that,” Jason said. “I look at these great guys … I think if a guy like that can do it, I can do it as well.”

Ken said strangers have offered him hugs. Mina said their house has dozens of visitors a day, including the Springville coaching staff and friends Jason hasn’t seen for years. They come bearing cards, baked goods or just a handshake.

Jessica Money said she read through all of the comments on the original Bleacher Report article this weekend, and was moved at how every negative comment was followed by a response defending or supporting Jason.

“The cool thing was, the second people started being critical, there was a positive message to every single one from people from Spanish Fork or random people who we don’t even know,” she said.

The entire family has had people seek them out or stop them to tell them about moments, some small, some significant, where Jason took the time to help or support other people.

“Jason is not the kind to brag about himself,” said Jessica, admitting she’s happy to assume that role. “He’s always the first person to look for the kid who doesn’t have a friend, or to go to the principal’s office and ask, ‘Who is having a hard day?’ It’s been who he is his whole life. He’s always been a special kid.”

Jason said he has always been keenly aware of how blessed he is. As a leader on his sports teams and in the school, he said he felt the need to be an example and sometimes a light to other people. In fact, some of the projects in which he’s involved, he doesn’t want to talk about because he wants to keep them between him and the people he hopes to help.

Jason smiles as he describes what it’s been like to be the beneficiary of such love, even on the heels of bizarre venom. He said it feels as if he’s “living through his own funeral.”

What he’s experienced in the last four days has broken his heart and enriched his soul. Every hour has been a mixture of moving through regret peppered with unbelievable cruelty and unexpected compassion.

Like the gentleman from Connecticut who called the school to talk to Money on Friday morning.

“I’ve been following your story closely,” Jason said the man said. “I’ve been on a mission and we have ties to Utah. We want you to know we all care about you. My family and everyone here has your back.”

Ken Money said he’s been overwhelmed with gratitude. In fact, he said what others have done for them has inspired him to reach out to others in a way he’d never considered. “I don’t know if I would have been the person to call someone or send a note,” he said. “But I’m looking for those opportunities now.”

* * *

The Moneys said this week has seen a lot of tears, many born of sadness but a lot flowing from joy. Not lost on his parents is the fact that their son’s high school career ended, and they didn’t really get to celebrate all he accomplished.

“What hit me is that’s the last play I’ll see him play,” Ken said. “He’s had 10,000 yards of offense. I know I sound like a dad, but he’s the most prolific quarterback we’ve ever had at Spanish Fork and fifth in the state, I think. … And that’s the last we’ll see him play in his helmet, in his high school uniform. All of a sudden you start thinking of those things.”

The Moneys understand the roller coaster that is competitive sports. In fact, they embrace it.

“It never crossed my mind,” Ken Money said of having regrets about getting his son involved in sports. “For every negative, and this is a big negative, we’ve had … so many opportunities he’s had that he only would have gotten through sports.”

Jason said he’s still working through the whys of what happened on Tuesday night. If he had the opportunity, he said he'd absolutely take the chance to live that 3.7 seconds again.

“But there’s no point,” he said. “So why beat yourself up about it? I’ve just got to face the music and take what you can learn from it. One mistake is not going to change the way I play, the way I work.”

But the support he’s received has given him a different lens with which to view his disappointment.

“I’ve had some pretty low lows, but to me, it seems like the positives have to outweigh the negatives,” Jason said. “It makes me emotional to talk about all of the support I’ve gotten. I can’t even begin to register all of the support … and how much it means. Just the fact that people would think about me like that, it’s had a big impact on me.”

His big sister steps in again, “We could say thank you every day for the rest of our lives and I don’t think it would be enough. … The nice words have saved Jason, probably. He’s a good kid and he’s strong, but it helps to have the support and the love of other people.”

Twitter: adonsports

EMAIL: adonaldson@deseretnews.com