For 12 seconds, Cameron Lindsey and Davion Brown were barely playing football anymore. The Pitt linebacker and Virginia Tech receiver wrestled on the turf, each refusing to give up a pass that had become a loose-ball battle. Lindsey eventually won it, coming away with the interception and sending Pitt’s sideline into celebration.

It was that kind of night at Lane Stadium. Pitt had already lost starting quarterback Mason Heintschel to an injury, with backup Holden Geriner, celebrating his 23rd birthday, stepping in and throwing the touchdown that helped put the Panthers ahead. Virginia Tech, meanwhile, had gone from 14-0 up to 35-24 down before Ethan Grunkemeyer dragged the Hokies back into the game.

With 3:54 left, Virginia Tech got the ball one more time. Grunkemeyer drove the Hokies 62 yards in 16 plays, putting them at the Pitt 18-yard line with three seconds left. John Love then stepped up for a 36-yard field goal, and when the ball rose toward the left upright, the veteran kicker threw his hands up as if he had just won the game. The crowd followed. The official did not.

The kick was ruled wide left. The problem is that it did not exactly look wide left. From the ESPN broadcast angle, John Love’s kick appeared to sneak inside the left upright. Another angle circulating after the game only added fuel to the argument. Even the reaction inside the stadium had the unmistakable feel of a made kick before the official standing beneath the upright waved it off.

For Love, that moment carried more weight than a routine missed kick. The fifth-year kicker had already made six field goals to open the season and entered Friday night with a long track record of delivering from inside 40 yards. This was supposed to be the kind of spot Virginia Tech trusted him to handle.

Instead, the Hokies were left staring at the officials while Pitt celebrated on the other side of the field. And the more the replays circulated, the harder it became to separate the result from the question that had followed it: did the ball actually miss?

There was plenty that had gone wrong before Love ever walked onto the field. Virginia Tech’s four turnovers gave Pitt 14 points, turning promising possessions into opportunities for the Panthers. The Hokies still piled up 499 yards to Pitt’s 295, but the giveaways kept changing where the game was being played.

That was especially costly during Pitt’s surge. Virginia Tech was held to just 27 yards in the third quarter while the Panthers produced 87, and fumbles by Ethan Grunkemeyer and Jeffrey Overton Jr. helped Pitt build its advantage. Grunkemeyer still threw for a career-high 434 yards, but every mistake made the eventual comeback that much harder.

And even after Virginia Tech had fought its way back, the final drive nearly unraveled before it reached Love. Pitt had a chance to force another turnover when Grunkemeyer was hit and the ball came loose, but Virginia Tech recovered. The Hokies kept moving, eventually reaching the Pitt 18-yard line and giving Love the final say.

The internet saw something different about John Love’s kick

The reaction arrived almost immediately. SiriusXM’s Geoff Schwartz posted, “Hmm … looks good.”

Another questioned the review. “Are we sure this didn’t go through the uprights? I think it did,” they posted.

Another reaction focused on the angle from behind the uprights. “Back angle looks in,” they wrote while sharing a clip of the back angle.

Another fan was convinced the kick was good. “It look like he made it,” they commented.

Then came the bluntest version. “Wait. I don’t care who wins but that was good. I don’t root for either team but that was good,” they posted. None of those reactions could establish that the kick was good, but they captured the problem with the call: the available angles left enough uncertainty for the debate to keep growing.

Virginia Tech linebacker Kaleb Spencer offered a similar reaction from inside the team. “Initially, everybody thought it went in,” he said, adding that, after watching the video, that was still what it looked like to him.

James Franklin admitted afterward that he couldn’t tell either.

“To be honest with you, from my angle, I don’t know,” he said. “I think John Love is the best kicker in the country. I had so much confidence that that thing was going to go through.”

That uncertainty is also why the NCAA replay rule became such a central part of the aftermath. A field goal can be reviewed when officials are determining whether the ball went inside or outside the uprights while it is below the top of the uprights. But once the ball crosses the end line above the top of the upright, the play is not reviewable.

In other words, television could keep producing angles, fans could keep freezing frames and players could keep debating what they saw, but the officials could not simply go back and overturn the ruling.

That left Love with a miss in the box score, even though the visual evidence never gave everyone the same answer.

Behind all the debate is an anxious John Love. But James Franklin backed his kicker.

“He broke us down in the locker room,” he said. “I got John’s back. So do all of his teammates.”

Franklin also refused to let the final kick become the entire explanation for the loss. He pointed to roughly 20 other plays that could have changed the game before Virginia Tech ever reached that final possession.

He added that he would put Love back out there in the same situation every time. For a kicker who had just watched a potential game-winner become one of the most debated plays of the night, that was the message Franklin wanted him to hear.

Pitt gets to leave Blacksburg at 5-0. Virginia Tech drops to 4-1. And Love’s kick will remain officially wide left, even as the debate over where that ball actually went continues.