One by one, they limp off the field.

The Kansas City Carnivores, the area’s first primarily gay rugby team, are down dozens of points in their first official Kansas City match. What’s unfolding on this early March afternoon is a shameful show of injury and defeat.

James Loehr, the team’s fittest player, scuttles from the field at Rockhurst University, sweaty and pinching his nose. Red dribbles from a nostril.

“Does anyone have a tampon?” screeches coach Bree Morales, a feisty brunette with Hulkish calves and a potty mouth.

A throng of male spectators glance at each other and shrug.

She tosses her car keys to one of the fans to fetch three tampons in the backseat of a black Nissan Altima.

Five minutes later, the fan returns. Morales promptly shoves a cottony stem into Loehr’s nostril.

A few feet away, Yama Keyser writhes in the cold grass, his face twisted in pain. He had dislocated his left shoulder, but he didn’t know that yet. Brad Clark, the baby faced team founder, staggers to the sidelines, grimacing and tenderly cupping his forearm.

The Carnivores lose 85-0 in what can be described as a pile-up. Then something remarkable happens.

The team hobbles into a huddle after slapping hands with the victorious Kansas City Rogues.

Clark hoarsely hollers: “Who are we?”

A resounding reply. “The Carnivores!”

“What do we do?”

“Eat meat!”

And then, these 15 or so unlikely athletes shuffle to the goal post where they never scored, and smile for a team picture.

Because for this ragtag roster of men in traffic-cone orange jerseys, it’s not about winning.

● ● ●

The story of Kansas City’s gay rugby team began on Sept. 11, 2001. A public relations executive named Mark Bingham raced to the Newark airport to catch his flight home to San Francisco. He was the last passenger to board and sat behind two hijackers in first class on United Flight 93. Minutes after that plane departed, Brad Clark, a Kansas City-based student at New York University, stepped out of a subway station and glimpsed black smoke billowing from a gash in a World Trade Center tower.

These two men never met, but both experienced the day in a profound and irreversible way.

Bingham, an original member of one of the country’s first gay rugby teams, was among the passengers who stormed the cockpit so the terrorists wouldn’t reach their target in Washington, D.C.

Clark spent days after the attacks living in seclusion, glued to a TV like so many other Americans. As profiles of victims emerged, Bingham’s story struck him. Like Clark, this man had been a proud member of the gay community.

“It’s that personal experience for whatever reason I shared with Mark, being gay,” he said. “I identified with Mark’s story, and as time went on, something finally clicked for me to play rugby.”

Clark had never played a sport before.

In 2009, he joined the Kansas City Rogues, a fledgling team, where he gained enough skill to compete as an individual at the 2010 Bingham Cup, a biennial gay rugby tournament created to honor his hero. There at the June event in Minneapolis, he met Bingham’s mother, Alice Hoagland. Clark tearfully recounted his 9/11 experience to her.

Together, they wept as strangers who shared a tragedy.

Then she asked a question that would reroute Clark’s life.

“Why doesn’t Kansas City have a gay rugby team?”

● ● ●

After the tournament, Clark returned to Kansas City and posted flyers in bars to gauge interest from the gay community.

In less than a month, the Kansas City Carnivores were hatched, with an orange-and-blue logo of a Tyrannosaurus rex and a roster of 30. Soon after, the team notched corporate sponsors in Grünauer, an Austrian restaurant, and Sidekicks Saloon, a gay sports bar in midtown that has since become the team’s hangout.

Problem was, hardly any of the members knew how to play rugby.

But they had something to prove, to the investors who bought into them as an idea, to other local rugby teams and to Alice Hoagland. Clark plans to take the team to the Bingham Cup next year in Manchester, England.

“I cannot wait for the moment I can present the Carnivores to Alice,” he said. “Mark was the reason why I play rugby. She is the reason why I formed the Carnivores.”

Because of this team, scrawny and pudgy men who had spent a lifetime on the sidelines can play an intensely challenging sport against true athletes.

So far, it’s not going well.

Although the Carnivores took third place in a gay rugby tournament in Dallas last Halloween, the club had yet to win a match since the season began in late February.

Then, during an April 30 bout, victory seemed possible. Their opponents were the St. Louis Crusaders, a gay team that formed just months before the Carnivores and had never won a match. These teams had tussled before, tying at 0-0.

To pump up her players, Morales delivered an impassioned, F-bomb-peppered pep talk to her team’s flushed faces.

She played rugby for 17 years, becoming nationally ranked, before retiring due to an arm injury caused by, of all things, a stubborn spaghetti sauce jar lid.

Last fall, she stumbled into this coaching gig, earning herself a hard-ass reputation. Here’s a woman who carried a 200-pound player off the field after he fractured his ankle. She obliterated her voice from yelling too much in two different matches. She joined a game in Topeka and tackled a 6-foot-5-inch man.

Everything had led up to this bout. It was the Carnivores’ final game until Memorial Day, when they’ll travel to Chicago to play in a gay rugby invitational.

And against all hope, it wasn’t going as well as they had planned.

Shane Linden’s shoulder had popped, and he perched on a bench with a fistful of ice. Nyla Kongsinh’s legs were cramping, so he stretched on the sidelines. Exasperated, Morales slapped on a jersey and attempted to play before the referee rejected her.

The Carnivores fell to the Crusaders, 39-0. Clark plopped on the ground and forced a grin. “Those smug-ass bastards.”

● ● ●

How do you measure success?

The Carnivores, it’s not in goals scored, but in brotherhood and camaraderie.

In broken ankles and split femurs and the tenacity that implores an injured player to return to the field as soon as his doctor consents.

In swigging brews and belting naughty ditties about abortion clinics and Jesus with your opponents.

“Rugby is a lifestyle, and people who don’t play don’t understand,” Morales said. “We stick up for one another. We’re a family. This is the only sport in the world where we beat the crap out of each other and go have a beer together afterwards.”

It’s called the third half, a post-match social hour hosted by the home team, where ruggers drink and engage in decades-old traditions.

Like the Zulu, where a player traipses around naked after scoring his first try, the rugby equivalent of a touchdown. After the team’s first home game in March, Loehr, a studly 20-something, and Keyser, a former soccer player from San Diego, scampered through Sidekicks wearing nothing but mud-spackled cleats. As Keyser clamped a hand over his crotch, an opposing team erupted into a raucous chorus of “It’s a Small World After All.”

Then there’s the Boat Race, a beer-chugging relay that starts when a woman flashes her breasts. During a recent third half, five Carnivores sloshed Miller Lite down their throats and emerged victorious against three opposing teams.

And don’t forget Shoot the Boot, when a rugger guzzles beer from another player’s sweaty shoe, a penalty for bungling song lyrics.

These rugby rituals date back scores of years, bonding new players like the Carnivores with teams established a half-century ago. And when improbable friendships form among men, gay or straight, that’s a success all its own.

On a recent Sunday evening, the Carnivores gathered at Sidekicks to celebrate the bar’s anniversary. Over beer and Jell-O shots, the team reveled in capping its first season and raising more than $2,500 for the local AIDS Walk the day before.

During the party, several members of the team received news on their cellphones. Osama bin Laden had been found and killed.

The men sat solemnly, eyes trained on a flat-screen in the bar. Clark sobbed privately in his car, seized by shelved emotions. He thought of Mark Bingham’s bravery, both on the rugby field and in a plunging 747 that carved a crater into a Pennsylvania pasture. He thought of his own nightmare that unfurled blocks away from ground zero.

One catastrophic day had catalyzed war. For Clark, that day catalyzed love. Love of the game, love among brothers and a way to belong in a world where hate and evil exist.

Clark needed to connect with someone who would feel the effect of this night as he did. He turned on his computer and typed an email to Alice Hoagland.