Wagner’s 4th Try at a 4th-Down Job : Pro football: Former CS Northridge punter resurrects NFL career in Green Bay after stops in Chicago, Cleveland and New England.

If you’re a punter, dark thoughts regularly invade your head, creeping through your mind like cockroaches in the night, bringing sinister imaginings of all the things that can go wrong each time the football sails between the center’s legs in your direction.

Among them:

-- The ball goes over your head, forcing you to stumble back after it and capture it while a charging group of 250-pound men are trying to hit you hard enough to make you think you’re Ethel Merman for the next several days.

-- The aforementioned group will arrive just as you follow through with the kick, charging into you with granite-hard football helmets just at that oh-so-slightly vulnerable moment when you have one leg up above your head.

-- You miss the ball completely and kick somewhat maniacal 233-pound teammate Eugene Lockhart really hard in the seat of his pants. The other team recovers the ball for a touchdown. Eugene is angry. The team fires you 10 minutes after the game.

It was just Bryan Wagner’s luck that with all of the things that can go wrong on a punt, the worst one, that Eugene-kicking nightmare, came true.

It was Sept. 15, 1991, in Pittsburgh’s Three Rivers Stadium. The Steelers had pinned New England against its own goal line (who hasn’t? ), and on fourth down the Patriots sent Wagner in to punt. Because he was limited to only a 10-yard drop instead of the regular 15 that punters use, Wagner admits he was a bit nervous.

And then the nightmare unfolded.

Inexplicably, Lockhart, one of the Patriots’ blockers, took several steps backward at the snap of the ball. Suddenly, from Wagner’s viewpoint, the charging linemen, most of the stadium and the sun were blocked out by Eugene’s rather hefty caboose. Flustered, Wagner dropped the ball during the initial phase of his leg swing and then tried to stop his leg.

It was too late.

Momentum too great.

Space too confined.

Wagner’s foot thudded loudly into Lockhart’s rear end. The Steelers’ Ernie Mills fell on the ball in the end zone for a touchdown. The crowd of 53,703 roared with laughter, having witnessed one of the funniest moments of slapstick since Moe lodged the pronged end of a crowbar up Shemp’s nose and dragged the shrieking Stooge across the room by the nostrils.

Wagner didn’t have a crowbar.

But after the game he did get the ax.

He was banished by the pathetic Patriots for not being good enough, which is sort of like being fired by Roseanne Arnold for over-snacking. Wagner spent a year looking for work, trying out with several NFL teams, pushing hard for another chance.

And not getting one.

“I know it was the stigma of what happened that day in Pittsburgh,” Wagner said. “I think that’s why no one picked me up. I got some bad publicity. Any place I went for a tryout, no matter how well I did, I had the feeling they were looking at me and thinking, ‘This is the guy who kicked a teammate in the butt.’ It was really a bad deal.”

A bad deal, Wagner said, because he didn’t cause the botched punt.

“To start with, I had no room to work with. The ball was on the one-foot line,” he said. “And then Eugene starts backing up and gets way too close to me. At that point I ran out of space. I dropped the ball and tried to slow my foot down, but I got him anyway. I really got my foot into his behind.

“I got blamed for the whole mess, and it wasn’t my fault. After the game they released me. No chance for me to explain what happened, no chance for them to look at the film so they could see what happened. I was gone. That’s how the game works for a punter.”

But Sunday, Wagner punted again.

Wearing the green and gold of the Green Bay Packers, he kicked twice for a 40-yard average, including a punt of 44 yards that was downed inside the Philadelphia 20-yard line in the Packers’ 27-24 upset of the Eagles.

He got the chance to kick again because the Packers ran their regular punter, Paul McJulien, out of town after he had the audacity to get punts blocked in consecutive games against the New York Giants and Detroit Lions.

Punters, however, seldom get the benefit of the doubt. The good ones get a second chance. The great ones get a third chance. Not many get more than that.

Wagner seemed headed for a long and prosperous career as an NFL punter when he came out of Cal State Northridge in 1984. As a junior in 1983, playing only as a punter, he was named the Western Football Conference player of the year, which said much about Wagner’s kicking ability and perhaps even more about the level of talent in the WFC.

But the illustrious career many envisioned for the 6-foot-1, 200-pound punter never materialized. He has been in more NFL training camps than ankle tape--and has been discarded about as frequently. When he kicked for the Packers on Sunday he was appearing in a regular-season NFL game with his fourth team. He was the Chicago Bears’ punter in 1987 and 1988 and the Cleveland Browns’ in 1989 and 1990. Then came Wagner’s ill-fated rendezvous with the New England Patriots. He was relieved of his duties after the debacle in the third game of the 1991 season.

In between regular punting jobs, Wagner has been in and out of the training camps of the Packers (twice), Dallas Cowboys, Giants, St. Louis Cardinals, Denver Broncos and, this year, the Miami Dolphins and New York Jets.

Since losing the job with the Patriots last September, Wagner, 30, has spent a few days each week working out, staying ready for the chance he recently got. And for the past few months, he also has cared for his 9-month-old son, Matthew, while his wife, Robin, returned to her job as a television news anchor in Kansas City, Mo.

He was with the Packers in summer camp but lost the job to McJulien. When McJulien began to falter in the eyes of the Packers’ coaches, Wagner was asked to come back for another tryout on Nov. 6. Two days later, the Packers offered him a contract.

“I packed a bag and was in Green Bay in the morning,” Wagner said. “Sometimes teams bring in punters during the season just to motivate the punter they have. Put some pressure on him, telling him to start punting better or he’s gone.

“But this time I felt like they were really looking to make a change. They didn’t like what they saw and I got the call. That’s how it works.”

Wagner will live, he said, in the Green Bay Midway Hotel across the street from Lambeau Field as winter draws near. And when winter draws near in Green Bay, Wis., it is not unlike Bears’ lineman William Perry drawing near a buffet table: It happens with sudden ferocity and the visit lasts a long, long time.

“But there’s just seven weeks left in the season. I can handle it,” Wagner said. “Maybe I’ll be back here next year and get my own place. But you never know.

“Punting is a funny life. You don’t get hit much and you don’t have to watch game films. It can be boring sometimes. But I’ve always loved it.

“I love the challenge we face, the challenge of each punt, facing the pressure and the rush of linemen. But now I’m able to shut all of that out. It has to be just you and the football. You can’t think about anything else.”

Especially not Eugene Lockhart’s rear end.