The fastest University of Hawaii football game of this season may turn out to be long remembered for the few lingering seconds that defined it.

For those brief ticks of the Aloha Stadium clock in a 3-hour, 9-minute game, it was as if time stood eerily still in the Halawa rain.

The remnants of a gathering of 19,158 — and many of the players on the field — stared at a ball that lay alone on the wet UH 46 yard-line with just over nine minutes remaining in the fourth quarter.

“It just laid there,” New Mexico defensive back Lee Crosby said with enduring astonishment long after the stadium had emptied in the 28-21 UH loss. “I mean I looked around and it was still there”

UH coach Nick Rolovich compared it to “freeze tag.”

Crosby was “it” and what he did with Diocemy Saint Juste’s apparently helmet- jarred fumble, securing the ball and bolting 46 yards to the end zone for a somersault punctuated touchdown with 8 minutes, 53 seconds remaining, gave the Lobos a 28-21 victory and UH a heartburn that is not likely to go away soon.

It may yet turn out to be a turning point in the season, a juncture that separates the Rainbow Warriors, now 4-5 (3-2 Mountain West) from the long-harbored goal of bowl eligibility.

With the loss, UH must now win three of its final four games to earn a postseason berth for the first time since 2010.

It was UH’s only turnover of the game and “I don’t think anybody saw the the ball loose out there (for a while),” Rolovich said. “Nobody understood that it was a fumble.”

Cosby did. “I didn’t hear any whistles, so I was going for it,” he said.

He also grasped what it meant in the scheme of things for this night.

“We needed it. It was time for the defense to come up and make a big play.”

What was expected to be a high-scoring shootout of teams averaging 40 points (UNM) and 31 (UH) became, remarkably enough, a defensive game.

For its part, UH’s defense held the nation’s No. 1 rushing offense 137 yards below its season average.

It might never have come down to being the determining play had UH been able to make something of its third-down opportunities. The ‘Bows converted just two of 13 third-down situations into first downs.

“That’s pretty dismal, all right,” Rolovich said. ”What’s that, 15 percent? You don’t win many ballgames that way.”

And the ’Bows, who had been a 39.4 percent team on third down, didn’t. “That’s why we were having to go for it on fourth down so often (five times). They dictated play to us. And that’s not what you want.”

Crosby played an all-too-familiar role. Last year in a 28-27 victory over UH in Albuquerque, Crosby intercepted two passes, including one with less than a minute left to thwart UH’s last-ditch chances.

Crosby, a senior, said he promised himself he’d do “something exciting if he scored a touchdown” even if it drew head coach Bob Davie’s animated, red-faced ire. As the accompanying unsportsmanlike conduct penalty did.

For the celebratory somersault, “I give myself, maybe, a ‘7’,” Crosby said. “I didn’t stick the landing.”

Instead, he just might have stuck the dagger in UH’s postseason hopes.

Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@ staradvertiser.com or 529-4820.