INDIANAPOLIS — Eric Winston does not move to take off his uniform. Twenty minutes after the game and he's still sitting there at his locker in full uniform, staring straight ahead. Thirty minutes after the game and he hasn't budged — the sweat and grass stained No. 73 stays on as his teammates shower, change and go about the process of trying to move on from Colts 19, Texans 16.

Winston cannot let it go though. The right tackle isn't going to be able to turn the page on this one. Not this night. Not anytime soon.

"Yeah, well if you played like that on national TV, you'd be pretty disappointed too," he says.

Winston is bothered by the way Indianapolis Colts defensive end Robert Mathis handled him, more than annoyed that the Colts became the first team with only one win to beat a team with 10 wins in NFL history. This one stinks on so many levels. So Winston sits and stares.

"I was playing against a good player," Winston says, "and he played better than me. He played a lot better."

Winston is one devastated big man. But I'm not sure he's that much more upset than the Colts fans I run into on the way to the elevator at a nearby hotel. Their team wins in a most, unlikely electrifying fashion — with Reggie Wayne catching the winning touchdown pass with 19 seconds left after journeyman Dan Orlovsky (the Colts' third quarterback of the season not named Peyton Manning) leads a 78-yard, 12-play drive in the last two minutes.

And, these fans are livid. That their team won.

"Why did Houston have to go do that?" one asks. "How do you let Orlovsky drive the whole field? They had to mess everything up."

In truth, the NFL officiating crew did its best to screw things up for both the Texans and the Colts. With a slew of questionable calls, including two against Texans rookie defensive end J.J. Watt on the decisive drive, the guys in the black and white stripes just may change the future of several NFL franchises.

Houston (10-5, with only one regular season game left before a tough playoff matchup) may never right itself now. If Watt isn't called for a hands to the face penalty (one that negated the rookie with the endless motor's sack) and a roughing the passer penalty on back-to-back plays in the final 46 seconds — calls that made NFL Network commentator Mike Mayock livid — the Texans likely hold onto to a 16-12 win. Suddenly, they have hope rather than a budding quarterback controversy.

But the calls that let Orlovsky play hero may end up hurting the winning team even more in the long run.

For the Colts only needed to lose to Houston to clinch the No. 1 pick in the NFL Draft and dibs on all-world quarterback prospect (and former Houston-area high school player) Andrew Luck. Indianapolis fans — including that bitter elevator brigade — could have been ordering No. 12 Colts jerseys at Lucas Oil Stadium Friday morning.

Now . . . the Colts have two wins and a whole lot of other franchises are at least suddenly in the Luck mix.

All because it inexplicably starts to rain yellow flags inside the enclosed future home of Super Bowl XLVI.

Oh, the Texans do plenty to lose the game. They should be up by far more than four points with 1:50 remaining. But that does not make the calls any less egregious.

"The Colts benefited from some calls, some of which I would call highly questionable,” Mayock tells America (or at least the portion of it that stayed with this Thursday night struggle).

"Flags kill you," Texans defensive end Antonio Smith says. "They kill you every time. They change how you're feeling about a play, the flow of the game . . . everything."

A Peyton Conspiracy?

If this was the NBA, now would be the time to start dusting for David Stern's fingerprints. This almost screams out as one of those NBA conspiracies (after the Chris Paul trade debacle, you can pretty much drop any "theory" qualifiers from any discussion involving the NBA).

After all, it'd be easy to see the powers that be deciding that adding Luck to follow Peyton Manning is just too much good fortune for any one franchise. Especially one in the middle of the Midwest. Not to mention how awkward it might all turn out to be for Manning, the league's pitchman golden child.

So why not just throw a little . . .

This isn't the NBA though. And to be truthful, the officiating crew in Indianapolis makes almost as horrible a call in the Texans' favor on the drive right before the game-winning one. Houston might never be in position to up its lead to four if Colts free safety Antoine Bethea isn't called for a helmet-to-helmet unnecessary roughness penalty on a ball-dislodging hit where his helmet doesn't appear to come anywhere close to Kevin Walter's.

Watt — who could teach a rookie symposium on how to handle questions — goes out of his way to take the blame for those crushing yellow flags.

"At the end of the day, no matter how they happen, you can't get penalties and that's what I did," Watt says.

When pressed, Watt sticks by his personal responsibility mantra. "They were called. That's all I can say," he says when asked if the calls were legit. "The referees called them and I can't argue with the referees."

They were horrible calls. It's hard to leave the players on one team and the fans of the other team equally annoyed. But that's what this out-of-whack NFL night does.

The Texans cannot win for losing. Colts fans cannot help feeling like they lost for winning. Maybe, they can all share a beer.

"I'm just angry more than anything to tell you the truth," linebacker Brian Cushing says.

Winston finally trades his uniform for a suit, but doesn't shed any of the despair.

"At the end of the day, we didn't stay on the field and we didn't finish drives," he says. "And a lot of that falls on my end."

Like a yellow flag fluttering to the ground.