By JOHN JAMES MARSHALL/Designated Writers

You are probably a bigger New Orleans Saints fan than I am, so I’m not going to blame you if you want to skip another post-mortem on Sunday’s 26-20 loss to Minnesota in the NFC Wild Card game. I like the Saints — a lot, actually — but I was going to have to revert into the Green Bay fan that I have always been had the Saints won Sunday.

But I understand your pain.

Losses like this are just so … so … final. One minute, you are thinking you are still going to find a way to win and the next you see Minnesota’s Kyle Rudolph catching one in the corner of the end zone.

Silence in the Superdome.

You realize that this is the third straight year for a really, really tough playoff loss and that is hard to take. Seventeen weeks of buildup and then it’s gone, zapping every bit of fandom right out of your being. People who love the opera or bird watching never have to deal with this kind of pain.

Let’s be honest, though: This was, by far, the third toughest to take of the three previous playoff losses. Games like Sunday happen all the time; what happened the previous two years is 100-year-flood-type stuff.

Please allow me a couple of points that may seem like I’m rubbing it in, when I’m really not.

(1) When the Vikings lined up on third-and-goal in overtime in that formation, the Saints should have known what was coming and called an immediate time out (they give you a few hundreds time outs in OT) when they saw Rudolph, who is 6-foot-6, being guarded by P.J. Williams, who isn’t.

(2) That’s not offensive pass interference so please don’t try to say it is or even might be.

(3) Anybody can beat anybody in the NFL playoffs. When you don’t show up ready, or when you get a bad break or two, the other team has coaches, too. And the players in the different-color jerseys are pretty good, otherwise they’d be at home watching. It’s a thin line.

And I won’t remind you that had a Seattle tight end been three inches closer to the goal line last week, the Saints wouldn’t have even had to play in this game because they would have earned a bye.

Instead, it’s now a bye-bye.