CINCINNATI -- All the stars were aligning.

Just after they capped a 15-point comeback with AJ McCarron's 25-yard touchdown pass to A.J. Green with 1:50 left in Saturday night's wild-card round game against the Pittsburgh Steelers, the Cincinnati Bengals appeared to be receiving some favor from the cosmos.

Here, the cosmos appeared to be saying, 'You're about to win your first playoff game in 25 years, Cincinnati.'

And then, 14 seconds later, the cosmos gave an abrupt "not so fast," and snatched the postseason destiny that has eluded this city for a generation.

"To have everything right there in front of you, and to have it slip away like that, words can't really describe it," Bengals running back Jeremy Hill later said.

It was Hill's late fourth-quarter fumble that gave the losing Steelers life and the ball back with 1:36 remaining in a defensive classic that was only about to get even more interesting. By this point, you've no doubt read or even debated the impact Vontaze Burfict and Adam Jones' personal-foul penalties had ahead of Chris Boswell's 35-yard game-winning field goal in the game's final seconds.

Before those plays, though, there was Hill.

The same player who lost a trio of fumbles in the regular season couldn't retain possession at the most crucial of times Saturday. All Hill had to do was hang on tight to the football, cram it into his chest pads as he ran, and pick up yards that kept working time off the clock. With Pittsburgh possessing all three of its timeouts, the Bengals felt they had to get a first down -- and force the timeouts to be burned -- before they could think about taking a knee at all. Since Hill got six yards on his fumbled carry, it seemed that -- had he held on to the ball -- all he would have needed was one more run to get the key first down.

"I don't think we were necessarily in field-goal range there," coach Marvin Lewis said. "You want to get the first down, and win the football game there by running the ball, and we gained six or seven yards ... so I'm not second-guessing that."

Hill said that when he saw a video review upheld, confirming his fumble, he thought about what him and his teammates had put into the whole season to get to that point.

"It's just how hard we worked, everything that we go through," Hill said. "The city, everyone waiting for this moment, and to have that moment right in your hands and to have it slip away, words can't really describe it."