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At every game, if you’re paying attention, you’ll see something you’ve never seen before. It’s my Snowflake Theory. Every game is somehow different from every other game ever played.

Maybe it started for me when Lee Corso, then a young coach at the University of Louisville, walked to midfield on a Thanksgiving Day – with a turkey on a leash.

Here’s Michael Jordan with the ball. Flying in the left lane on a break. A step and a half past the free throw line, he goes up. In the air, turns his back to a defender. Now floating backward toward the basket, the ball resting in the palm of his right hand, he flips it into the air – and off the board, into the hoop, as if he knew it all the time.

Never seen that before, one of a kind.

Snowflake.

Tiger Woods has 260 yards to the dogleg-right par-5 14th at Pebble Beach. Hits it into a greenside bunker, then gets it up and down for a birdie. This is worth knowing because of his thinking from out there in the fairway. If he cuts a 3-wood, it rolls across the green and down an unforgiving hill. Hit it straight, it flies into that bunker and buries. So he decides to roll a 5-wood into the bunker and up its far face to leave himself a simple sand shot.

You may have seen a thousand birdies, but you’ve never imagined a player could be so precise with a 260-yard shot as to tell you where, exactly, it will stop rolling.

Snowflake.

So I’m watching the unbeaten New Orleans Saints losing to the godforsaken Redskins. It’s 17-10, Redskins, 30 seconds left in the first half.

From near midfield, Drew Brees throws into triple coverage, the kind of mistake born of an undefeated team’s arrogance. Appropriately enough, it is intercepted by cornerback Kareem Moore – and not only intercepted, but intercepted spectacularly, with Moore diving over a fallen Saint for the first interception of his NFL career.

As he rises to run at about the 30-yard line, there are questions: Was it a good catch? Or did he trap it? When on the ground, had he been touched by a Saint?

No time to wait for those decisions. He’s up and running loose and he’s finding blockers. The poor Redskins, 3-8 against an 11-0 team, have stopped the Saints again, and if Moore takes the interception 70 yards the other way, as seems to be his plan, it’s 24-10.

Whoa.

Now he’s stopped.

WHOA!

Now a Saint has the ball and he’s the one running loose.

It’s a touchdown, New Orleans, and it’s 17-all.

It’s "beyond bizarre, a once-in-a-century kind of thing," Dan Daly declares in the next morning’s Washington Times.

In a game that New Orleans finally wins, 33-30, and in a season when the Redskins have succeeded at nothing, that snowflake of a play says it all.

I would have written about nothing else. Maybe give the game’s many other absurdities a graf. Still, nothing else mattered once Kareem Moore went from hero to fool. Destiny had chosen sides.

It happens this way: As Moore takes off, Saints’ receiver, Robert Meachem, tackles him. But he does it in the way receivers tackle defenders, gingerly, so as not to spring any skill-position joints. He just grabs a hold on Moore’s arm, like, "Whoa, please!"

Next thing we see, the Saint has the ball.

He has pulled it out of the Redskin’s grasp.

As Moore falls, Meachem flies 44 yards to a touchdown.

"I was trying to make a play," Moore said afterward, quoted by Mike Fratto of the Washington Times, "trying to go score."

Perhaps it is harsh of a columnist to say Moore went from hero to fool when it’s true that Meachem made a major league play by ripping the ball loose as he has been taught to do, probably since the seventh grade. But columnists owe readers their best judgments – and the fact is, Kareem Moore already had made a play. He stopped a Saints drive. That’s a play. Now get down with the ball.

But no.

"It’s every defensive player’s dream to get a pick six," Moore said.

From 70 yards away? Run it all the way back? Trying the improbable is better than settling for a play that might win the game on its own?

"I wouldn’t change nothing about it," Moore said, "probably just hold the ball high and tight."

Yeah, the way he’d been taught, probably since seventh grade.

"Other than that, I’d try to score again," he said.

The Redskins then were reduced to hoping instant replay would overrule the interception, by showing the ball had hit the ground before Moore controlled it. That, or show that Moore had been touched down before he could run.

No, again.

They lost both ways.

And when they had lost the game — when Redskin placekicker Shaun Suisham missed a chip-shot field goal for a 10-point lead at 1:56 to play – I thought of Paul Brown, the legendary coach.

In the first year of the Cincinnati Bengals, Brown’s kicker missed a chip shot to win. With that icy look that my buddy Tom Callahan described as "the homicide inspector viewing the body," Brown said, "The shame is that the efforts of 50 men were wasted by the failure of one." If not then, the kicker was cut the next morning.

Snowflake.

Dave Kindred’s next book will be "Morning Miracle," an inside-the-newsroom account of two years in the life of The Washington Post. Now a contributing writer at Golf Digest, Kindred is a Red Smith Award winner and member of the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association Hall of Fame. He can be reached at inkstained1@aol.com. He can be followed at Twitter.com/DaveKindred and facebook.com/people/Dave-Kindred/509353295.